First, let me say that I am a committed creationist. I believe that an intelligent being created everthing………everything. I live in Kentucky, just a few miles from the Creation Museum. I will add that I am grateful for Ken Hamm and his staff for standing up for their convictions. The creation museum teaches creation in 7 twenty four hour “earth days”. That causes me to pause. I am not sure that they are right. I certainly am not sure that they are wrong either. There is no question about the existence of an intelligent creator. But, I think that there is some room for doubt about the equivalence of 7 biblical creation days and 7 modern “earth days”.
I see my calling as a marketer for Christianity. My job is to draw people to God/Jesus/Holy Spirit. My job is to depopulate hell and improve believers.
There are two ideas that are my biggest obstacles:
Darwinian evolution and creation in 7 “earth days”. Darwinian evolution is an idea created by man. Darwinian evolution is the most dangerous idea that man has ever conceived. It is deadly because it eliminates the need for God. It gives man an excuse for assuming sovereignty. I will attack it without a qualm. Creation was an act of God. But, the tension between creation in seven 24 hour days and modern science is widely used by secular humanists to ridicule the concept of creation……the concept of intelligent design. Even worse, that tension is used to ridicule the creator……..God. I cannot reject the idea of creation in 7 modern earth days…….but I think that there is room to explore it. If a biblical creation day is a metaphor describing an era, possibly lasting billions of years, then the gap between the Bible and scientific observation narrows dramatically. This eliminates one of the most powerful weapons of the secular humanists.
It all comes down to this:
What is the definition of a biblical creation day?
The secular humanists and the scientists tell us that the evolution of the universe took billions of modern earth years.
But, what does the Bible say?
Day one
He separated light and dark
Day two
He separated the water below the air from the water above
Day three
He separated earth from water and created plants
Day four
He separated the light into stars and the moon and planets
Day five
He created and separated fish and birds
Day six
He created land animals, man, and work. He separated man and woman
Day seven
He separated work from rest
So far so good.
But, notice that the stars, including our sun, did not exist until biblical day four. Our modern earth day is defined by the relationship between the earth and the sun. This relationship did not exist until Biblical day four. The day described on creation days one to three could be defined differently from a modern earth day. I think that it is entirely possible that a biblical creation day is a metaphor representing an era, possibly billions of modern earth days.
And I will leave the seven days of creation at that.
But what about the 8th day?
To be clear, day 8 is my invention. It could very well be a metaphor for an era also.
The Bible teaches that the heavens and the earth were completed in 6 days. On the 7th day God rested. But the story goes on. God was clearly not finished with his work. The rest of the Bible deals with the triumphs and failures of man. It introduces us to our rescue by Jesus. Then, it culminates with the destruction of the physical world and the creation of the New Jerusalem”. This is an eternal spiritual world. This is God’s final act of creation. Could this be day 8 of creation? Could day 8 be the end of the temporal/physical world and its conversion into God’s eternal/spiritual world?
Back to the acts of separation:
The Bible clearly teaches that there will be a final act of separation. This final separation will be catastrophic for many of us. God will separate the people, the souls, that he has created into two groups. He will take the people who have chosen to have a relationship with him, based on his sovereignty, and draw them to him for eternity. This is the “New Jerusalem”………Heaven. Those people who have rejected the sovereignty of God…….. those who have embraced the sovereignty of secular humanism…..will be sent elsewhere. We can quibble about the details…….but hell will not be nice.
Like it or not, Christians will spend eternity with God. Secular Humanists will spend eternity elsewhere. The horror of this is that there are a lot of good people, kind people, nice people who will be on the wrong side of this final sorting. As Christians, we are required to reach out to them.
“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”Jesus, describing the final judgement, Matthew 13: 24-30, ESV