Posted on 11/25/2014 7:41:28 AM PST by fishtank
‘From the beginning of creation’—what did Jesus mean?
There’s no getting around Jesus’ teaching on the age of the earth
by Keaton Halley
Published: 25 November 2014 (GMT+10)
Not everyone welcomes this news, but some of Jesus’ statements imply, of necessity, that the world is young. This is something I regularly point out when I speak in churches about creation, and it is a theme on which we have written previously, in articles such as Jesus on the age of the earth and in chapter 9 of Refuting Compromise. To reiterate the argument briefly, Jesus claimed that human history began at approximately the same time as all of creation came into existence, not billions of years later. This is evident from Jesus’ statements like: “from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female’” (Mark 10:6). The obvious implication from these words is that Adam and Eve were on the scene shortly after the heavens and earth were created; they were not latecomers to a cosmos that had already endured for billions of years, as old-earth proponents insist. Thus, for those who take Jesus’ words seriously, there is no way to fit billions of years into Genesis 1 prior to Adam and Eve.
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
Yes; that was a good read. Thank you.
Would you care to comment on the notion that time, as we now understand it, is a creation of God’s and that, based on Scriptural analysis of “days”, time perhaps wasn’t created until something changed to remove (permanently, as far as they were concerned) man from the Garden of Eden, where the Lord God was known to take a walk at least one early evening.
To me, forbidding man to re-enter the well-secured Garden of Eden, was akin to the third of the angels being expelled from Heaven and cast to earth.
Perhaps all that was when God’s already-created timepiece began ticking?
I would argue that discerning what God says about his own actions is hardly "checkmating" him.
No longer do I try to limit God in my daily walk of faith in His Firstborn Son Jesus Christ who said “My Father is working until now, and I am working,” for which He was accused of blasphemy.
Yeah, but look at the context: Yeshua (Jesus) was accused of sinning by healing on the Sabbath. His response is that God himself does indeed "work" on the Sabbath, since the world continues to exist and children continue to be born, and that therefore doing what was obviously another (if more blatant) miracle from God could hardly be considered a sin.
That point remains true whether we're talking about the weekly Sabbath or God's cosmic Sabbath.
Are you an Israelite in whom there is no guile?
My own Jewish heritage is muddled at best. However, my wife and therefore my children are Jewish (and my son was circumcised on the eighth day by an Orthodox rabbi) and I have chosen to say to her, "Your people shall be my people."
Are you a believer yet in Jesus Christ as Lord of all Creation?
Yes.
Are you part of "the latter rain" that was foretold?
I know about six different ways Joel 2:23 has been interpreted, so you'd have to be more specific before I could answer in truth.
Shalom
I am of the opinion that we will never know the answer to that question...and many others. The earth was shaken up like an etch a sketch during the great flood. I would go with what Jesus said!
Indeed it was. How would an Old-Earth Creationist perspective be a problem for that?
We’re seeing light coming from far more than the “Big Bang” estimation of the age of the universe as well, so that isn’t a valid argument.
Actually, it is. The reason we can see light coming from 15 billion light years away when the universe is only an estimated 13.8 billion years old is because it has continued to stretch out, just as Scripture predicted. Basically, the fabric of space-time itself isn't constrained by the speed of light, so light that began travelling when the size of the universe was smaller effectively travels from further away by the time it reaches us.
As far as the “lying illusion”, I’ve addressed that as well. God told us exactly what happened. How is that “lying”?
We currently track the detonation of super-novas in distant galaxies. If we see a star explode in Andromeda, 2 million light-years away, and the universe is only 6000 years old, that means that the star we just saw explode never even existed. Therefore, anything further than 6000 light-years away would have no actual existence and the appearance of a universe beyond that point would be a deliberate deception on the part of its Creator.
Shalom
I invite you to take a good shot at my post 61. Thank you.
Obviously this is a very complex issue that we cannot argue on this forum.
People who have examined it in depth would present a better argument...
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/does-distant-starlight-prove-the-universe-is-old/
And without going into too much detail at the moment, I would point out that the original Hebrew words for "day," "morning," "evening," etc. have somewhat different ranges of meaning than you might assume from the English translation. As a matter of fact, as my ability to read the Hebrew has increased, so has my comfort with Old-Earth Creationism.
Shalom
No idea.
All I know is that Scriptute says that we need to be careful that we don’t dive too deep into futile speculations and and create quarrels between believers that don’t further His kingdom. (Rom 1:21,1 Ti 1:4, 2 Ti 2:23)
Jesus was invoking Genesis to teach about divorce not some scientific statement that the earth was 6,000 years old.
Argument #1: Speed-of-Light Decay (aka CDK)
There are literally a dozen different ways to time the speed of light that do not depend on atomic clocks, including the ability to measure the energy--and therefore the speed--of photons at their point-of-origin no matter how far away.
But there's another much simpler response: E=MC^2. If the speed of light were different in the distant past, we would be able to detect the dramatic (square-function) changes in energy output and/or mass in distant stars. For that matter, even a small increase in C would have resulted in the incineration of Adam by our own sun.
Argument #2: Time on earth might pass at a dramatically different rate than the rest of the universe
This is basically just a play on Humphries White Hole Cosmology, which I addressed back in post #56. There are a number of problems with this view that are addressed in the article I linked to, but I'll focus on just one:
Earth is not the center of our local galaxy, which we know is well over a mere 6000 light-years in diameter. To have the kind of effect that YEC demands, you'd have to have the galaxy rotating around the earth, not the other way around. Morever, we've observed active events like supernovas in our own galaxy at a distance of over 20,000 lightyears, so that invalidates the whole raison d'etre of the theory.
Argument #3: Assumptions of Synchronization
This doesn't actually make a difference, since nobody is arguing about how old the universe would seem to be to a photon, and the relative speeds of the galaxies to each other can be measured via red-shift. Moreover, there are certain types of supernovae that have a very distinct time-line in terms of their energy outputs that we use as universal clocks to measure the relative speed of time in distant galaxies.
So it's true that different parts of the universe have different ages. It's also true that thanks to the finite speed of light, we can watch the whole history of the universe right back to when the light first separated from the darkness--and that history is far older than 6000 years in our local time.
Argument #4: The Assumption of Naturalism
It doesn't take naturalistic assumptions to look up, take measurements, and realize quickly that there's no way for the light to have reached us in a mere 6000 years. This argument is just a scare-tactic by the YEC crowd: "If you believe in an old universe, you don't believe in God!" That's utter nonsense.
Argument #5: The visible universe is larger in radius than the age of the universe
Already addressed. The continued stretching out of space-time provides a sufficient mechanic to explain this when the difference is 15-17 billion light-years to 13.8 billion years. It is insufficient to explain seeing 15 billion light-years in 6000 years--the speed at which the universe would have to expand would actually rip the atoms to shreds and nothing could ever form.
As I've said in another post, the problem is not the Bible vs. Science, the problem is an interpretation of the Bible based only on its English translation vs. virtually everything we can observe around us. Those with an ability to read the original Hebrew and understand how it's just plain different from English (very different tenses, for example, which actually resolves the Day 4 problem) generally have no problem at all with an old universe.
To put it another way, the Hebrew can be read in a YEC way and an OEC way equally well. Why not then use the information God has made available to us in his other direct creation--the universe itself--to break the tie?
Shalom
We have the answers we need without making stuff up.
Taking Jer 4 23-28 out of it's context is no proof at all. Read ALL of Jer 4 and tell me where you get the idea to peel 23-28 out of it's place in the chapter...
However, the creation of Old Earth theology is a relatively new thing. It is one of the tools by which the liberals have been able to get away with things like evolution and not taking the Word of God as seriously as it deserves to be taken.
If Young Earth theology is true, there is no room for the millions of years that the evolutionists have claimed is necessary for the development of the earth and species. They need this to create a sense of mystery which bars the simpler truths of God's power from being manifest. God's powers as Creator are watered down; history is something unknowable and beginnings are unreachable. The plain meaning of Scripture becomes murky then not only in creation but it spreads throughout.
There is method in their madness. The evolutionists have succeeded in making God that much more unknowable and in so doing have elevated an elite class to what was before God's domain.
Some people see this as the injection of Christ ("let there be light"...the light of God) before any thing else was created.
I've always thought this as well.
It's widely accepted among christians that God created Adam fully formed.
Wouldn't it be logical to believe that the rest of creation was fully formed as well when God created it? Why Adam and not the earth?
Including a nice, “stable” balance of “daughter elements” in rocks...
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