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the Days of Creation


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Hello I guess this is about my last words on this topic, hope you find time to read them and consider them.

By the time Moses had been born, the word 'Day' must have been used to reference a day, this must have been in the language presumably from the beginning,

Then God gave Moses revelation including Gen 1&2 God would have used the language which he had Given Man before in Adam

So the Days of Genesis were named by words which the Hebrewians were familiar with, just in a very similar manner that we are familiar with the English, they would have been familiar with the Hebrew words for Days, Evenings and Mornings.

The question is, do we define the understanding of the First Day in Genesis, by the Context of Moses Culture, or do we define our understanding of the Day of Genesis by the Context within which it is given, I.E. within the revelation.

In a similar way to the visions of Daniel, we see the use of words with which the Hibrewians are familiar, ie week or days, do we define those weeks, and days, by conforming them to the Hebrew culture, which would be very similar to us demanding that a week is a literal seven day week, or do we define them with the context of the vision with which they are contained?

As I read Genesis,  Chapter one in particular cannot be historical in the proper sense of the word, for obvious reasons, I.e. in the early verses there was no earth and no man to take a record of anything. After the third day we read:

Ge 1:14-16 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

We can tell from the description that this is talking about what we now know as the sun and moon and stars. That is the creation of our days, and our inhabitable environment.

After the fifth day God made the Animals and finally Adam/Man, male and female made he them. So there is the start of Man's history, and a more detailed account from an historical perspective is given in Genesis two. But our 24 hour days or warm periods, only started in day four of of Genesis 1.

And I say again if you take a thoughtful look at Genesis 1:1-5 God made a Light, and he called that light DAY, this was the original first mentioned and first created Day, and the warmth wasn’t anything to do with our sun. So the other six days (and evenings) must be of the same type as this first one. That is why I say contextually it cannot be in reference to our 24 hour days, because our days had not been created as yet.

Job 38:4-12 Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed? Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place;

As far as going against the word of God or the fundamentals, I’ve been here before, it is religious tradition talking, I guess some fear, my faith is in God as revealed in Christ, not in any traditional interpretation of the Bible. I used to be Catholic, I recognise Zeal based in Tradition, The Gospel is an attack on the fundamental Catholic world-view which to them is almost like life itself, it is their historical and spiritual sense of self. You sound like you are doing the same thing, putting some of your faith in tradition/traditional understanding and equating it with faith in God or Gods revealed word, or putting your faith in Gods word as interpreted by tradition. I can assure you I will not knowingly go against Gods word on any point, this does however lead to clashing with Christian traditional interpretations quite often.

And I say again I don't think this (Moses days or Gods days) is a fundamental doctrine of Scripture, other than in it is an accurate account of God creating the universe given by revelation through Moses, as the text itself affirms, latter in Genesis, If I recall. But in that we find it in our Bible that is enough affirmation to it's accuracy for me. I believe the creation account is foundational to a mature understanding But Christ told Peter that it was the revelation of who Christ was which was the rock on which the Church was to be built.

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Wow! Why not just accept what Scripture says? Sword and others have given excellent answers already yet you continue to carry on which makes a person wonder "why".

Well John, if we all go for the easy option we might still be Roman Catholic, I'm sure they used to wonder about what motivated those pesky separatists.I rely on Scripture. 

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Well John, if we all go for the easy option we might still be Roman Catholic, I'm sure they used to wonder about what motivated those pesky separatists.I rely on Scripture. 

Relying on Scripture means believing and accepting what Scripture says, not trying to scheme it or intellectualize it away. While others have presented the clear meaning of Scripture, you have attempted to circumvent this and invent your own concept in its place. That's far more akin to the methods of the RCC than is accepting God's Word for what it says.

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Hello I guess this is about my last words on this topic, hope you find time to read them and consider them.

By the time Moses had been born, the word 'Day' must have been used to reference a day, this must have been in the language presumably from the beginning,

Then God gave Moses revelation including Gen 1&2 God would have used the language which he had Given Man before in Adam

So the Days of Genesis were named by words which the Hebrewians were familiar with, just in a very similar manner that we are familiar with the English, they would have been familiar with the Hebrew words for Days, Evenings and Mornings.

The question is, do we define the understanding of the First Day in Genesis, by the Context of Moses Culture, or do we define our understanding of the Day of Genesis by the Context within which it is given, I.E. within the revelation.

The answer is an unequivocal, yes, we define the understanding of the First Day in Genesis by the context of Moses and the culture he lived in. He was perfectly capable of understanding long expanses of time and had a language capable of expressing it. You can't assume that ancient man was ignorant and just couldn't grasp such a simple concept as time. He grew up in a relatively advanced culture that build pyramids and had a ridiculously complex pantheon of false gods. Of course he could understand if God wanted to convey anything other than a literal day. He used the language of a literal day because that's exactly the message He wanted to convey. One of the key principles of biblical interpretation is that a passage of Scripture cannot mean what it never meant to the original audience. Otherwise, it is false or incomplete revelation and that is not reflective of a God defined by truth, justice, and holiness.

As I read Genesis,  Chapter one in particular cannot be historical in the proper sense of the word, for obvious reasons, I.e. in the early verses there was no earth and no man to take a record of anything. After the third day we read:

It is absolutely, without a doubt, 100% historical narrative prose. There are no traces or hints of Hebrew poetry, prophecy, of apocalyptic literature and there are no indications of rhetorical devices such as allegory or symbolism. It is the same linguistic structure as the historical narrative prose that follows it (i.e. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther). You're making unwarranted assumptions about the literary nature of Genesis 1 that are in complete contradiction to what just about every Hebrew scholar of every era will tell you.

As far as going against the word of God or the fundamentals, I’ve been here before, it is religious tradition talking, I guess some fear, my faith is in God as revealed in Christ, not in any traditional interpretation of the Bible. I used to be Catholic, I recognise Zeal based in Tradition, The Gospel is an attack on the fundamental Catholic world-view which to them is almost like life itself, it is their historical and spiritual sense of self. You sound like you are doing the same thing, putting some of your faith in tradition/traditional understanding and equating it with faith in God or Gods revealed word, or putting your faith in Gods word as interpreted by tradition. I can assure you I will not knowingly go against Gods word on any point, this does however lead to clashing with Christian traditional interpretations quite often.

And I say again I don't think this (Moses days or Gods days) is a fundamental doctrine of Scripture, other than in it is an accurate account of God creating the universe given by revelation through Moses, as the text itself affirms, latter in Genesis, If I recall. But in that we find it in our Bible that is enough affirmation to it's accuracy for me. I believe the creation account is foundational to a mature understanding But Christ told Peter that it was the revelation of who Christ was which was the rock on which the Church was to be built.

I apologize if I have been coming on a little strong on this one, but it is not an issue of tradition. A tradition is a dogmatic practice or doctrinal assertion that has no biblical foundation. The Catholic church has many of these, and I'm sure you know them well. However, this is an issue of sound biblical interpretation. 300 years ago your position would have made absolutely no sense to anyone capable of reading the Bible in any language. 100-200 years ago you would have been looked at cross-eyed and called out for supporting Darwin. 50 years ago you would have been accused of being on Darwin's side of the Scopes Trial. Today, there are so many Christians have capitulated to evolutionary theory being taught as fact for long that they've felt compelled to reinterpret Genesis to accommodate the evolutionary timeline at the expense of upholding biblical inerrancy. Your position, whether you believe so or not, is a concession an atheistic worldview that has been steadily beating the drum that the earth is older than the Bible says it is. Non-literal interpretations of Genesis only ever made sense after people began trumpeting deep time.

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>>>It is absolutely, without a doubt, 100% historical narrative prose. There are no traces or hints of Hebrew poetry, prophecy, of apocalyptic literature and there are no indications of rhetorical devices such as allegory or symbolism<<<

Matt you are getting very unreasonable, using many words but not making much sense,

Your not making much sense, History is a written record of events written by people who were there, Apoccalypic, is An apocalypse (Ancient Greek: …meaning "uncovering"), translated literally from Greek, is a disclosure of knowledge, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation. In religious contexts it is usually a disclosure of something hidden. I don’t need to ask you, you should know yourself neither Moses nor Adam Nor Job was there when the events of Gen 1:1 took place, so it is apocalyptic by all normal usage of the words. The Lord doesn’t just reveal in vision or in potery, he spoke to Moses face to face, as a friend.

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The question is, do we define the understanding of the First Day in Genesis, by the Context of Moses Culture, or do we define our understanding of the Day of Genesis by the Context within which it is given, I.E. within the revelation.

>>>The answer is an unequivocal, yes, we define the understanding of the First Day in Genesis by the context of Moses and the culture he lived in<<<

So do you take the weeks of Daniel as weeks, and the wheels of Ezekiel as chariot wheels or something wheels? but then Chariots don't have wheels within wheels.

If The Lord was wishing to give the impression that the first day was based on our sun, I think he might have said that.

something like 'God made the Sun and the moon the first day' Its true, he could have.

The way he has done it just shows us that his Days are bigger than ours, we can be rather blind at times and assume things. Matt you seem to be overly worried about what the heathen are up to.

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And I say again I don't think this (Moses days or Gods days) is a fundamental doctrine of Scripture, other than in it is an accurate account of God creating the universe given by revelation through Moses, as the text itself affirms, latter in Genesis, If I recall. But in that we find it in our Bible that is enough affirmation to it's accuracy for me. I believe the creation account is foundational to a mature understanding But Christ told Peter that it was the revelation of who Christ was which was the rock on which the Church was to be built.

I think I agree with this one. If someone has to have read Genesis for themselves and understood everything in it, as well as having read and understood everything else in scripture that reveals something about what sin is and/or where it comes from, then don't we end up asserting that the Gospel message is nothing less than all of scripture, and that a person must have read and correctly understood all of scripture in order to be saved?

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>>>It is absolutely, without a doubt, 100% historical narrative prose. There are no traces or hints of Hebrew poetry, prophecy, of apocalyptic literature and there are no indications of rhetorical devices such as allegory or symbolism<<<

Matt you are getting very unreasonable, using many words but not making much sense,

Your not making much sense, History is a written record of events written by people who were there, Apoccalypic, is An apocalypse (Ancient Greek: …meaning "uncovering"), translated literally from Greek, is a disclosure of knowledge, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation. In religious contexts it is usually a disclosure of something hidden. I don’t need to ask you, you should know yourself neither Moses nor Adam Nor Job was there when the events of Gen 1:1 took place, so it is apocalyptic by all normal usage of the words. The Lord doesn’t just reveal in vision or in potery, he spoke to Moses face to face, as a friend.

What I mean is its literary structure and genre is prose (as opposed to poetry or prophecy or apocalypse) and its sub-genre is historical narrative (i.e. event x then event y then event z, etc). All of these different types of writing are distinctly different. Prose is characterized by use of common-use language and matter-of-fact expression. Historical narrative is a relating of past events in chronological sequence, often interspersed with dialogue (as opposed to fictional or mythical writing).Yes, Genesis was revealed to Moses, but it was recorded as history in the style of Hebrew prose writing and not as apocalyptic literature which is highly figurative, ominous, and often poetic.

 

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The question is, do we define the understanding of the First Day in Genesis, by the Context of Moses Culture, or do we define our understanding of the Day of Genesis by the Context within which it is given, I.E. within the revelation.

>>>The answer is an unequivocal, yes, we define the understanding of the First Day in Genesis by the context of Moses and the culture he lived in<<<

So do you take the weeks of Daniel as weeks, and the wheels of Ezekiel as chariot wheels or something wheels? but then Chariots don't have wheels within wheels.

If The Lord was wishing to give the impression that the first day was based on our sun, I think he might have said that.

something like 'God made the Sun and the moon the first day' Its true, he could have.

The way he has done it just shows us that his Days are bigger than ours, we can be rather blind at times and assume things. Matt you seem to be overly worried about what the heathen are up to.

No, Daniel and Ezekiel are both prophecy. Hebrew prophecy contains a large amount of symbolism and is usually written in verse form with a lot of rhetorical language. It is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

I'm "overly worried about what the heathen are up to" because it has infected the modern church like a virus. It is turning the youth who grow up with one foot in church and one in the secular world being force-fed an atheistic worldview away from the church and away from Jesus Christ. The overwhelming majority of people who reject the faith they grew up say their journey toward atheism began with a rejection of Genesis in favor of Darwinism. For a church to concede any ground on this issue is to willfully cast a stumbling block before an unsaved youth, which was met with harsh criticism by Jesus Himself (Matt 18:6)

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I apologize if I have been coming on a little strong on this one, but it is not an issue of tradition. A tradition is a dogmatic practice or doctrinal assertion that has no biblical foundation. The Catholic church has many of these, and I'm sure you know them well. However, this is an issue of sound biblical interpretation. 300 years ago your position would have made absolutely no sense to anyone capable of reading the Bible in any language. 100-200 years ago you would have been looked at cross-eyed and called out for supporting Darwin. 50 years ago you would have been accused of being on Darwin's side of the Scopes Trial. Today, there are so many Christians have capitulated to evolutionary theory being taught as fact for long that they've felt compelled to reinterpret Genesis to accommodate the evolutionary timeline at the expense of upholding biblical inerrancy. Your position, whether you believe so or not, is a concession an atheistic worldview that has been steadily beating the drum that the earth is older than the Bible says it is. Non-literal interpretations of Genesis only ever made sense after people began trumpeting deep time.

There is Traditional doctrine as well, in pentecostal churches and among Reformists, all round. I don't see why you are so concerned about Darwinians, & Co. Do they really shape what you believe, do you need to stand opposite them, no matter what they say? As I mentioned before back in the days of the reformation they used to believe that the earth was the centre of the solar system and the sun travelled round the earth, Calvin said while preaching on 1 Cor, that anyone who believed that the sun was in the centre and the earth rotated round it was insane and probably demon possessed. I know you won't think that much of Calvin, but it is a fairly typical sort of way which people bind their faith in Gods word to their faith in their interpretation of it, and it only gets worse when most believe the same interpretation.

Having said that lets go with what John was saying and move this into the other thread, 'how old is the earth.

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I think I agree with this one. If someone has to have read Genesis for themselves and understood everything in it, as well as having read and understood everything else in scripture that reveals something about what sin is and/or where it comes from, then don't we end up asserting that the Gospel message is nothing less than all of scripture, and that a person must have read and correctly understood all of scripture in order to be saved?

Someone agrees with something I said  ;)  :clap::D:clap:. And that really was my original point.

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I think I agree with this one. If someone has to have read Genesis for themselves and understood everything in it, as well as having read and understood everything else in scripture that reveals something about what sin is and/or where it comes from, then don't we end up asserting that the Gospel message is nothing less than all of scripture, and that a person must have read and correctly understood all of scripture in order to be saved?

That's not exactly what I'm asserting. The Gospel message stands on it's own. However, when one begins to investigate the claims of the Gospel, all of its tenets point back to the truths proclaimed in Genesis. If we, as believers, muck up the understanding of Genesis, we run the risk of making the Gospel become nonsense to those we're trying to lead to Christ.

Simplistic Example: (assume there is adequate conversation leading up to this point)

Christian: Jesus died to pay for your sin

Unbeliever: I'm not a sinner

Christian: The Bible says in Romans 3:23 that all are sinners

Unbeliever: What about kids? They haven't done anything wrong.

Christian: The Bible says in Romans 5:12 that we've all inherited in a sin nature because of Adam (insert explanation on how that makes us all sinners)

Unbeliever: Wait, so you're you believe Adam was a real person...?

Christian: Yes, of course.

Unbeliever: You mean like he was the first human to evolve or like God literally created him.

Christian: God literally created him, just like it says in Genesis.

Unbeliever: So you take that whole creation thing literally? No way, science has proven that the earth is billions of years old. There's no way that all happened in six days. Your Bible doesn't make any sense. I'm not sinner, I live a good life.

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Old Pilgrim said: And I say again if you take a thoughtful look at Genesis 1:1-5 God made a Light, and he called that light DAY, this was the original first mentioned and first created Day, and the warmth wasn’t anything to do with our sun. So the other six days (and evenings) must be of the same type as this first one. That is why I say contextually it cannot be in reference to our 24 hour days, because our days had not been created as yet.

It is absolutely contextually in reference to our 24 hour day, because it is the first of seven days given in the context, the foundation upon which they are all based. Regardless of whether the light sources were made or not, the fact that God made the light, which He called day ad separated it from the dark, called Night, tells me that He set the boundaries for the days from the beginning. He didn't need a sun moon or stars yet. Also, in context, He made the plant life before He made the sun, by which the plants grow, and before the bugs, by which the plants are pollenated. So you are suggesting that the plants lived for, who knows HOW long before the sun was there to nourish them and the insects to cause them to reproduce? I am sorry that you can't wrap your head around a God that can created a 24hr day before He creates the sun and moon, but its what the Bible says He did, and I have no problem with it.

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The source of the light is largely irrelevant, but Rev 21:23 indicates that it could have been God's glory if nothing else. The presence of the sun is not necessary for light to exist.

Let me ask you a question. Why do you feel that it is wrong to dogmatically assert a 24-hour day? Why look for any interpretation other than the obvious and plain meaning on this one?

Hello Matt, (I guess threads end naturally not by being grafted. )

>>>obvious and plain<<< I have never thought Gen 1 had an obvious and plain meaning,  for example what's ‘ a firmament in the midst of the waters’, or ‘the face of the deep’?

>>>The source of the light is largely irrelevant<<< but this light once divided from the darkness WAS the first DAY. 

I think revealed Truth is going to be accompanied by the Spirit of Truth, he doesn't guide us by modular instalments, but by one step at a time, and so even if it is partial non systematised truth it will be more powerful witnessing tool than a systematised safer truth mixed by error. I think bad moves by the church does lead to endless suffering, but I would trade a 'safe' error for a 'dangerous' truth.

 

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