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Yes. We need to tread very carefully in dealing matters concerning what He wrought before we existed.

Job 38 (where God challenges Job):

Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?

Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken.

Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this.

What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years!

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?

Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c] or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth?

God makes it painfully clear: When we start to speculate about the mind of God and what happened during creation (beyond what He has revealed to us) we tread of very shaky ground.

Who knows the unfathomable mind of God? For no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God (1 Cor 2:11). Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? (1 Cor 2:16)

This is why I can't support Ussher's 6000 year calendar that starts at 4004 BC. It is not because it is repeatedly and gleefully used as a cudgel by atheists to beat believers sensesless rhetorically (which is why you see it brought up in the media all the time).

The problem is that a 6000 year timeline is not Biblical. It is based mainly on a misreading of 2 Peter 3:8 (which is quoting Ps 90:4), where Peter states with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

Ussher did a basic misreading of Peter. What he did was simple. God created the world in 6 days, a day to God is a 1000 years, so 6 times 1000 years = 6000 years, QED. But don't you see? That's not what Peter wrote! He wrote a thousand years is like a day to Him, not that it literally was.

I am not arguing that it is merely a metaphor. Why? Because I don't have to. 2 Peter 3:8 is not a metaphor, it is something much stronger. It is a simile ('like a'). Peter wrote 'like a' very deliberately, I think, to prevent exactly the kind of bogus literal misinterpretation that Ussher did. To underscore that fact Peter intentionally used two similes and reversed them: that from God's perspective it can go either way. In other words, I think the point Peter is making is actually quite clear: that the passage of time is basically irrelevant from God's perspective.

This is why I give a sigh whenever I see a Young Earth creationist argue the 6000 year timeline with an atheist. Invariably it only serves to reinforce the atheist's unbelief. Why? Not because a I think a belief in a 6000 year-old Earth is scientifically wrong, but because the Bible does not demand it. I will admit that the Earth really might be 6000 years old - I don't know because I wasn't there - but we cannot demand it, and in particular we should not base out witnessing on it to unbelievers as a condition of their salvation.

This is why I think hanging your hat on Mark 10:6 as an assertion that Adam and Eve were created immediately after the stars and the heavens is very dicey. What does 'From the beginning' actually mean to a God that exists outside of time and space? Where you there? Do you know the mind of God? Yes, Adam and Eve were created as the first man and woman, and yes they sinned and Adam fell. But beyond what scripture reveals to us you cannot safely go.

Basically, don't try to put God in a box. He wants us to marvel as His creation, for the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands (Ps 19:1). Just give glory to God and praise Him for the majesty of His creation, of the universe He created with 100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars, and revel in coolness of his Plan for us and what He wrought, and be thankful for the underserved gift of salvation that we receive in the blood of Christ Jesus.

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?

Ussher did a basic misreading of Peter. What he did was simple. God created the world in 6 days, a day to God is a 1000 years, so 6 times 1000 years = 6000 years, QED. But don't you see? That's not what Peter wrote! He wrote a thousand years is like a day to Him, not that it literally was.

Sorry, but this is a significant misrepresentation of how Ussher came up with the dates he did. He may (or may not) have had an overall sense of where he would end up, but the actual work of calculation was painstakingly detailed, grounded in marker days and built on a pretty good assumption that the so-called Julian year (365 days plus one added every few years) is much older than the famous Roman after who it was named. See the following article for details:

https://answersingenesis.org/bible-timeline/the-world-born-in-4004-bc/

To which I would add that most modern young earth creationists give much more latitude to the genealogies, allowing that multiple generations may have been skipped for their relative unimportance. So you will be hard-pressed to find a young earther who holds rigidly to Ussher.

As to whether Ussher was confused by the passage in Peter, I doubt it. He was a man of high intelligence and significant accomplishments. If you have direct evidence, as in a primary source, that shows him correlating the days of creation to thousand year epochs based on this alleged misunderstanding of Peter, I'd like to see it. I don't think there is such a thing. But who knows? I could be wrong.

As for the "unknowability theorem," i.e., "we can't know because God didn't actually tell us," that's not really true. God did tell us. In any ordinary discussion in Hebrew, to the best of my knowledge, any occurrence of "day" ("yom") accompanied by an ordinal number ("first, second, third, etc.") is always a solar day. OK, granted, in this one instance, it could, hypothetically, be a metaphor for a larger period of time. But that would be a break of the pattern. To break that pattern, i.e., to unambiguously signal metaphor, there would have to be clues in the text suggesting that "solar day" was not a good fit to the plain meaning of the text. But the only "difficulties" accepting those days as just being ordinary days arise from our modern, preconceived notions of how long the events described must have taken, based on what the "high priests of scientism" have told us. But God is able to do in a moment what we cannot conceive of happening in a million years. We're talking miracles here.

So what in the text would suggest to Moses or any of his readers that God was unable to perform those creative tasks in ordinary solar days? Not a blessed thing. Indeed, God, as Augustine suggests, could have done the whole thing in a moment. The fact He did it in six days was probably for our convenience, so we would have a seven day pattern around which to build the routine of our lives, not to mention how it figures into Hebrews, as a teaching tool to lead us to our resting from our works in the heavenly Sabbath provided by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

So while yes, God does many things above our heads, that are at some level inscrutable, many things He tells us plain and simple, and yet we have sin-hardened hearts, and are slow to believe the obvious, even when God delivers it to us like a lazy softball pitch.

Peace,

SR

The problem is that a 6000 year timeline is not Biblical. It is based mainly on a misreading of 2 Peter 3:8 (which is quoting Ps 90:4), where Peter states with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

Swing and a miss.

The evidence for the age of the earth comes from the genealogies found in the Bible. Ussher is interesting because his observation fits what the genealogy evidences.