A Strange, New World

Genesis 2:4-25 is our text for today's post.  Along with Genesis 1, this passage reveals "a strange, new world".  The passage in Genesis 2 more or less goes back and provides a more detailed look into the creation of Adam on Day Six and first days after the first Sabbath.

Verses 5-7, while extremely troubling to those who hold to a creation over many years, make perfect sense when you accept a literal, six days of creation.  Here are the verses for your convenience:

5Now no shrub of the field had yet grown on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.6Springs would well up from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. 7The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Genesis 2:5-7 (NET)

It is entirely reasonable, then, to accept God created plant life on Day Three, but that such plant life then began growing at a normal rate after its creation, watered by mists and springs.  Three literal days later, on Day Six, God created Adam.

Verses 9-14 describe Eden's location in that day, before the worldwide flood, described in Genesis 6.  This information was transmitted over the generations until Moses formally codified it into the book of Genesis.  The Tigris and the Euphrates rivers still exist to this day, giving us a general idea of the geographical location of the original Eden.  However, we are unable to pinpoint Eden's actual location due to the cataclysmic earth changes that resulted from the worldwide flood.

Moreover....

We would be making a serious error to look at our world today, even the wild "untouched" areas of Earth and deduce that "the heavens and the earth" today are very much like how they were at their original creation.  We tend to look at our current state of being as humans and make false deductions about the past, by observing the present.  This, of course, presupposes the past was exactly like the present, which is most certainly untrue (based on what we learn from Genesis).

Case in point:  take a look back at Genesis 1:29-30 (NET) - -

29Then God said, “I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30And to all the animals of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to all the creatures that move on the ground – everything that has the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food.” It was so.

We don't hear many sermons preached on this topic, but the truth is that, before the introduction of sin into the human race and, by extension, into God's original "it was very good" creation, all animal life was vegetarian; all were herbivores.  I'll delve more into that later.

Note also that rain did not fall from the skies to water the Earth in these days (Gen 2:5).  In fact, the first time rain fell on the Earth was when God initiated the process to produce the great flood of Genesis 6.

Adam spent some undetermined amount of time - - scripture does not say - - interacting with God's creation, tending the Garden of Eden, and naming the animals (Genesis 2:19-20 NET)

19The Lord God formed out of the ground every living animal of the field and every bird of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20So the man named all the animals, the birds of the air, and the living creatures of the field, but for Adam no companion who corresponded to him was found.

At some point, Eve was created.  For some reason, God wanted us to know that Eve was created after Adam and that she was created from the body of Adam.  I'm glad Father in His divine plan chose to reveal this information to us.  Such does not imply Eve was in any way inferior to Adam, but merely that the male and female of our species are inextricably linked.  It also points out the very true differences between male and female.  (All this modern-day nonsense about allowing children to determine their own genders is just that - - satanic nonsense.)

We would also be mistaken to believe that our human biology today is anything more than inferior to that of Adam and Eve.  There is no doubt our race (in fact the entire creation) has been corrupted/diminished by the sin curse which Adam and Eve brought upon all of God's perfect work.  Keep in mind: Adam lived to be over 900 years old.  Living for hundreds of years was, according to scripture, commonplace in those days.  Over time, the sin curse produced more and more negative effects in this world, and not just on Earth.  The Bible says "the whole creation groans" under it (Romans 8:22).  Nasty, destructive "weeds" in the Garden of Life....

How long did Adam and Eve dwell in Eden before that great, fatal mistake was made?  We are not given that information.  But, in the next post, we will continue to look at the early days of Adam and Eve, while considering the question that has been posed by so many doubters:  "Who did Cain, Abel and Seth marry?"

Ruin and Reconstruction

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)

Those who subscribe to this Ruin and Reconstruction belief use as proof the Hebrew language itself.  They claim that the first word translated "was", at the beginning of Gen. 1:2, would more accurately be translated "became".  Here is what respected mechanical engineer and Christian apologist, Bodie Hodge, has to say on that topic:

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/