In order to "reconcile" evolutionary theory with Genesis 1, some Christians attempt to "create" (sorry! Genesis pun!) millions of years of geologic time in between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Back in the late 1970s, even the chancellor of my very religiously conservative alma mater said from the pulpit he subscribed to this. (At the time, I had never heard of it...)
This belief, which began to be propagated in the 1800s by men such as G.H. Pember (Earth's Earliest Ages), is sometimes called "The Gap Theory" or "The Ruin and Reconstruction Theory". It essentially says that God initially created all things (Genesis 1:1), a "primitive creation" so called. This process lasted an untold period of time, during which the fossil record was established. And then a cataclysm of some sort caused all of that creation to be utterly destroyed. Some theologians place the fall of Satan and 1/3 of the angelic host within this "gap period". The cataclysm is often referred to as "Lucifer's War", in that it resulted in all of creation becoming "null and void". Genesis 1:2, then, is said to be essentially a literal 6-day "re-creation", and the beginning of the modern era (the last 6000-7000 years). This position is an imposition of outside ideas onto Scripture, even though I can certainly understand the lure. I mean, if God has always existed, is it reasonable to believe that He created nothing until about 6000 years ago? Still, we must stick to God's written revelation, since that is the information He has given to us on this topic.
1In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:1-2 (ESV)
Actually, recognized grammarians, lexicographers, and linguists have almost uniformly rejected the translations “became” and “had become.” It is a basic exegetical fallacy to claim that because Strong’s Concordance lists “became” as one of the meanings of haya, it is legitimate to translate it this way in the particular context of Genesis 1:2. It is simply grammatically impossible when the verb haya is combined with a waw disjunctive—in the rest of the Old Testament, Waw + a noun + haya (qal perfect, 3rd person) is always translated, “was” or “came,” but never “became.”
Indeed, most Bible translations yield the Hebrew "haya" as "was".
The earliest Greek translations of the Old Testament around 250 BC (The Septuagint) reject this translation of these two verses; "was" was accepted as "was" until the 1800s.
There is an even bigger problem with the gap theory.
It concerns when sin entered into the world.
In order to support the gap theory, one must believe that sin and death occurred prior to the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. This is directly contrary to Scripture, which describes all that God created in Genesis 1 as "very good". A specific characteristic of that "very good" is found in Genesis 1:29-30, where we learn that before the Fall of Man, all animal life was vegetarian. 😳
Yeah. So, there's that.
Furthermore, if the gap theory were true, carnivores, sin and death would have had to existed before the supposed "Satan's War", since death is a result of sin and since carnivores and death are firmly established in the fossil record. Who would have been responsible for that death over millions of years? God?! It supposedly occurred before the fall of Satan..... An additional problem is that, if all creation were destroyed in "Lucifer's War", would not that fossil record have been totally wiped out too? For that matter, what about Noah's flood? Would it have left virtually no trace in the fossil record? So, in this way, this position completely nullifies the point it is trying to prove.
From 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5:12 we are reminded by Paul that Adam was the first man created and that it was because of his (and Eve's) sinful disobedience that sin and death entered into the world. As we will explore in more depth in the coming days, things got so bad God had to utterly destroy the world of Noah by a global flood, which laid down the intriguing, mysterious fossil record so clearly observed by scientists and historians today.
The approach gap theorists and others who seek explanations contrary to Scripture adopt is to extrapolate the past from viewing the present...believing the observable present is the undisputed key to the past. One facet of this is to believe that the rate of decay and fossil formation observed today have remained constant over time, commonly called "uniformitarianism". It says that the layers of the earth formed at an even, regular rate, over millions of years.
There is ample evidence for a young earth - - evidence which gap theorists and secular scientists studiously ignore. Some of those phenomena are: the activity within the earth's magnetic field, the behaviors observed in spiral galaxies, the amount of salt in our oceans, to name a few. There are many more.
Today's post has only scratched the surface of this flawed explanation of creation. I invite you to study it more on your own, if you have the interest. I find it sobering to note that this line of reasoning began in the 18th century, in order to harmonize with secular scientist's faulty "discoveries" in that age. When students schooled in "gap theory" began to realize its logical inconsistencies, they went with the only other "intellectual" alternative, evolution, even though there are many flaws with evolutionary theory (the most notable being the more recent discoveries about DNA, which were not known in Darwin's day). The point is this - - when you begin to compromise, add to, read into, "stretch" God's word a little bit, you open the door for future generations to further expand the apostasy.
As supernatural (surprise! God!) as it sounds, the book of Genesis is very clear and straightforward. It is time for the Church to return to the authority of, the amazing truth of, God's Word, to firmly plant our feet there, to become knowledgeable of the many proofs for a young earth and to, like Martin Luther, say "here I stand".
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Sources:
Pember, G.H., Earth's Earliest Ages, 15th ed., 1942.
Fields, Weston. Unformed and Unfilled, Burgener Enterprises, 1997.
https://answersingenesis.org/genesis/gap-theory/what-about-the-gap-and-ruin-reconstruction-theories/
