The Word of God tells us how the first living souls became tricked by their own wrong thoughts and fell for the pleasing of their eyes and by their disobedience to God got punishments over them and got being banished from the Garden of Eden.
After having looked at Adam we cannot pass his helper Eve. It was she who brought the man to follow her idea and to ignore God's Wish not to eat from the Tree of moral, with as consequence that they got knowledge of good and evil and came to learn pain and death.
Study of geology over some centuries now has shown evidence of a succession of different eras represented by layers of rock giving evidence of the development of the earth over millions of years.
Religion and science may impinge on each other, and for this reason ‘creation’ is for some believers an emotive, not to say disturbing, subject. For some, Darwin and evolution have discredited Genesis and over the last century in the English-speaking world believers unwilling to ignore the facts of geology have had the problem of offering some explanation of what the Bible teaches on this subject.
The problem has been aggravated in some circles by an unwritten taboo on open discussion of the subject. The truth of the Bible, it has been said, can be accepted without getting bogged down in current scientific opinions.
In our review of the Biblical story we look in this article at the second account of the beginning of everything.
Looking at traditional general rendering and some older Jewish rendering of the possible mistranslation of the first verses of the Book of Genesis and foundation concept of religious thinking.
Of course, in our age, this subject is commonly tied up with scientific cosmogony, of how things did in fact originate, and here the questions cease to be religious since, first, very few believers are qualified to have an opinion on the latest scientific ideas of how the universe and life on earth began, and, secondly, no one can be sure that scientific conclusions will not change in the future.
In the second chapter of the Bereshith light is shed on the day that יהוה Elohim made earth and heavens and created a beautiful Royal Garden where man, made in the image of God, could live in peace, with the animals, to which he receives rulership (not
ownership over the earth).
We do not think we should take the Genesis 1 story speaking about a 24 hour day but about a day in the eyes of God which is much longer than 1000 hours. We should consider it more as a symbolic way of telling like we still sometimes use in our language and in “our day” or it “takes a day (at least)” indicating it takes many days or when talking about years or an age (number of years since it was made + period in history + generation + to mean a very long time + lifetime + period or state of humanlife).
From the context and looking at what is written in other chapters of the Bible we may assume it is not mankind’s “day” of “24 hours” but God’s day or periods in the creation of God.
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To remember:
Our opinion is that the Hebrew in Genesis 1 when it speaks of days is not describing a 24 hour earth day as we know it now.
consider 6 days of Creation in Genesis 1 as being other than literal.
EG Henry Sulley
“As to the period occupied in the six days of the work of creation, we have no means of knowing how long a “day” is from the Divine point of view.”[1]
Bro Walker stated
“we cannot agree to restrict the “days” of creation to literal days, and the original “rest” of God likewise to twenty-four hours! Critics will please be merciful to us”[2] possibly a fair request!
Bro Watkins observed
“sequence of events described in Genesis 1 is the same as the sequence that geologists have discovered by studying the rocks. This cannot be mere coincidence…”[3]
+ proposed days of Genesis 1 = 6 days of fiats (or commands by God).
Bro Carter said
Bible = record of God’s creative activity in the beginning and onwards.
Alfred Norris > Moses putting down what he heard + describing what he saw + announcing end of each period of revelation as day’s disclosure comes to its end
Bro LG Sargent stated to “leave the time involved in creation as an open question”[6].
slightly different model advocated by Bro Hayward > followed Bro Watkins > advocating 6 days of fiats = work being done at a later lengthier timeframe.[9]
Bro Andrew Perry expressed > “localised old earth”[11] model.
I don’t have any doubt that the Hebrew in Genesis 1 when it speaks of days is describing a 24 hour earth day as we know it now. The bigger question is whether Genesis 1 is a literal historical record of how God made all things.
There are some surprising examples exist of brethren who absolutely did not accept evolution but were prepared to consider the 6 days of Creation in Genesis 1 as being other than literal.
We are limiting the meaning of the text of the first two chapters of Genesis when we would only consider earth to be our globe. From the whole Biblical contexts we may assume that we must see the difference between eretz (earth or land) and haaretz (earth or ground) and aphar ha’aretz (dust of the earth or the sand or grains of earth) having also the globe and other planets around in the universe with their suns and stars.
When Jehovah created the universe, he created so many stars and planets that we could never count them all.
Problem with man is that they always think they know exactly how something is. But man’s knowledge is much more limited than God’s knowledge so often scientific results first taken as the answer seem some years later not true. As such we had one time the newspaper, the Houston, Texas Chronicle, reported that
“after a recent study, scientists now think that there are 300 sextillion stars in the universe.”
NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 55,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years away from Earth
That is a 3 followed by 23 zeros! But we should know it could be many more and we should see that somehow they are all organized. Yes, groups of stars are organized into galaxies. Each galaxy contains many planets and billions or even trillions of stars. Most galaxies are then organized into groups called clusters, and these clusters are organized into larger groups called superclusters.
The first chapter of Moshe’s book does not want to bring a scientific report on how everything is placed and structured but only wants to give a short review in a way which is easy to tell to others so that they can easily remember. For that reason the story-telling is the easiest form for oral tradition, for which it was provided. As such we should not take the story to be taken literally but figuratively. Also not considering the 6 days as literally six 24 hours but more as periods of development or if you wish ‘evolution’ .
A Caucasoid female skull (National Museum of Health and Medicine).
Today we still evolve and we should see how our own children and grandchildren are already so much different than us (see their body build). Those who want to see the first man as our contemporary man from Europe or the United states of America (the Caucasian type) mostly have a superiority feeling of their own race and are ashamed to have come from living souls (Leneʹfesj chai·jahʹh) who walked on their four limbs. (If you look at the body perhaps it was even not being made to walk on two limbs.)
Those who want to adhere to creationist views show they are missing many points of later books which form together the library of Book of books we call the Bible.
One pro Gap position suggests Gen 1:1 is a summary statement of the whole chapter. While we read heavens and earth as meaning the universe and the planet, possibly the verse should be understood as meaning the sky and the land since the terms heaven and earth are used later in chapter 1. We can test this suggestion by reviewing the chapter and context.
When we look at the Hebrew there is nothing particularly to affirm or deny the suggestion. The word ‘heaven’ has a wide range of uses from the universe through to the sky and air. Similarly, the word for ‘earth’ is extremely broad. So we must go to the context of Gen1 and see how the expressions are used.
Heaven
Used in v1
V6 the firmament is defined as heaven (with waters above and below it)
V14 the sun, moon & stars are set/placed in the firmament…
The Bible opens with the story of the beginning of everything, presenting the six periods of development (six days of creation) and the final period of establishment or rest.
Worldly books in no way can give such a clear picture to man what caused everything to come into being and how there may be a solution to the wrong steps taken by the first human beings. For this, man needs to understand clearly what caused this troublesome world. The Bereshith tells the story of the origin of life and death.
We have a.o. a look at a Messianic gentile his journey of faith and his discovery as a gentile of the Jewish Roots of his faith and examine who may call himself Messianic Jew and what for name could be suited to adapt when loving God and accepting His sent one Jeshua as the Messiah.
