ANNOUNCER: How long is the day described in Genesis chapter 1? Is it 24 hours or is it an indefinite period of time? What is poetic history and could it be intended in the writing of Genesis? What are the implications if Genesis is written as an allegory and not literal? An important discussion today, hope you’ll stay tuned. This is Grace in Focus, a ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society. Now our website is faithalone.org. We’d love you to go there and find our store, our most recently published, first volume of our Old Testament commentary is available now, as well as Bob Wilkins’ latest book, The Gospel is Still Under Siege. Find it all at faithalone.org. 

Now with today’s question and answer, here is Bob Wilkin, along with David Renfro. 

BOB: David and I were just practicing our Hebrew alphabet because in the last episode David was saying that it shouldn’t be that we’ve created man in our own image but as our own image. My Hebrew is very poor but I seem to remember that it was the Hebrew letter bet, 

DAVID: The letter for us is a letter B.

BOB: it can be translated as “in” or “as.” 

DAVID: Believe it or not, it normally is translated “in” and that’s why I think the translators choose to do that here but I think there’s enough in this context to say no, let’s translate it “as.” 

BOB: Okay, and we still remember the Hebrew alphabet. It’s interesting that we get the word alphabet, both from aleph-bet and from the first two Greek letters, alpha-beta. And by the way, I used to work at a grocery store in California called Alpha Beta. No, forget that y’all, don’t be confused by my ramblings. 

David, you’ve got an question that you’ve been asked and I’ve been asked this before as well and that is can the word “day” in Genesis 1 refer to an indefinite period of time which is a common view. It’s called the “day age view” is what some people say. So day one was some indefinite period of time. It might have been a billion or a trillion years but whatever it was, it was some length of time and then 2, 3, 4 and they don’t have to, you know, the funny thing is they don’t say that each period of time has to be the same length. So the first day might be just a thousand years and the second day could be a billion and the third day could be 100 million and the fourth day could be two billion. That kind of thing. And the Hebrew word for day is what? Yom. Like we get Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. So the question is can these seven days in Genesis 1 or six days of creation and then the day of rest be something other than a literal 24 hour day? 

DAVID: Well, see, that to me, that’s the issue. Do you take this passage, Genesis 1 as literal or maybe allegorical, on the other side allegorical or some people even call it mythical and if you don’t take it literal, you can pretty much make these words mean anything you want. 

BOB: Well, I’ll tell you, you’re right. And I’ll tell you, of course, the liberals will basically just say that what we get in Genesis 1, not just 1, but 2, and 3, and ultimately all the way to Genesis 11, they would say this is all myth. 

DAVID: It’s myth. Yeah, right. Liberals don’t, well, anything miraculous in the Bible that’s probably considered a myth or in some denominations, it’s allegory. It’s the eternal struggle between good and evil or something like that. 

BOB: But at our alma mater, Dallas Theological Seminary, it’s now being taught as poetic history. Have you ever heard that expression, poetic history? 

DAVID: No, I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase. 

BOB: So let me tell you what poetic history is. Some of this in Genesis 1 through 11 actually happened and some of it is poetic embellishment. So for example, what’s currently being taught at most leading evangelical conservative schools, including Dallas Seminary, is that Genesis 1 and 2 tell us that God created, it doesn’t tell us specifically how God created. So there’s room for the fact that it could be exactly as it stated there, but it also could be that this is giving us a lot of poetic license here. And so maybe God didn’t create Adam from dust or from the dust of the earth, but maybe Adam and Eve were preexisting hominids. And God breathed on Adam and breathed on Eve. They were part of hundreds of thousands of hominids, but they became the first humans. 

And so now you’ve got humans here, that might be what happened according to this way of looking at it. And then Eve wasn’t created from one of Adam’s ribs, but Eve was symbolic. It’s just poetry. And some would say, I remember hearing, I think it was John Stott, someone recorded him and he was one of the founders of the Evangelical Theological Society. And he said that he thought that the talking serpent was not literal, and that Eve was not deceived by a talking serpent. Now we know from 1 Timothy 2 that Eve was deceived by somebody, but there are many conservatives who say, no, we’re not to take that literally. And even the idea of a forbidden fruit, I think some would question that that was the nature of their sin. So my point is, what’s going on today, if you say that yom is not in Genesis 1 and 2 is not a literal 24 hour days, it opens Pandora’s box. 

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BOB: Jack Deere said, one of my Old Testament profs and I graded for Jack Deere for five years, I was his chief grader for a couple of years. He taught in the Hebrew department and he said in class yom with a numeral, yom with a number, always 100% of the time in the Old Testament refers to a literal 24 hour day. 

DAVID: Yeah, and that that was the point I was going to make too. Because if you look at the Hebrew, and I’m looking at the Hebrew text right now, it says, and it was evening and morning, yom echad. In other words, it’s evening and morning day one, and then the second day, day two, day three. 

BOB: And by the way, go back to what you said evening and morning. Evening and morning is what you get when you have the cycle of the earth rotating, what you get is we have from what appears to us, the sun rises, the sun sets, and we have a cycle of light and darkness. Well, day one had light and darkness because God said let there be light. And what’s interesting is the first three days are the form being set and the last three days are filling the form. So God created light without even the sun existing. And then in day four, he creates the sun. Now, when he creates the sun and the moon, okay, now you’ve got something to rule the night, but he still had light and darkness in the first three days. 

And by the way, this ties in with the book of Revelation, because we’re told in Revelation 21 that the Lord Jesus Christ is lighting up the New Jerusalem. And it doesn’t need the sun or the moon. Because Jesus lights it up. 

DAVID: Right. And that’s probably part of that new heavens and new earth. Right. That’s mentioned as well. What’s interesting you mentioned about the order here. Do you remember with Genesis one, it says in the beginning, what? 

BOB: Yeah, God created. Bara Elohim. 

DAVID: And then what does verse two say? 

BOB: It was formless and void. 

DAVID: Formless and void. I love what formless and void is in Hebrew, tohu wa bohu. And you know, that’s exactly what it is, tohu wa bohu, formless and void. Yeah. But it also sounds like one of our things in English like, was willy nilly, you know, that kind of thing. 

BOB: Yeah. That same expression occurs in Isaiah in something that God doesn’t do. But the point, and some people say, therefore, there’s a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 2, which is possible. But I think more likely we should understand the reason it was tohu wa bohu is because God has not yet finished the creation. 

DAVID: Right. But he also, the six days of creation, the first three take care of the formless issue. And the last three take care of the void. 

BOB: I love that. I never heard that one. I like it. 

DAVID: Yeah. And so there’s, to me, this is not only God’s authoritative word, this is exquisite literature as well. 

BOB: It is poetry. I get that. 

DAVID: Well, no, this isn’t poetry. 

BOB: Well, isn’t it poetic in the sense that it’s got, well, I guess you’re right because it doesn’t have parallelism. 

DAVID: No, it’s, it’s not like the book of Psalms and most of the book of Job and stuff like that. Yeah, you’re right. It’s, it’s actually, it’s kind of more of a narrative. 

BOB: So you would say it’s more of a prose history. 

DAVID: Yeah. That’s what I think. 

BOB: Yeah. And by the way, we always have the question of how Moses learned all this. And I think there’s multiple ways. For one thing, Adam and Eve would have communicated the creation accounts to their children and their children that would have had an oral tradition. But on top of that, the Holy Spirit revealed these things to Moses. So anything lacking or any way in which the oral tradition was wrong was clarified by the Holy Spirit. So he got it just right. 

DAVID: And he guaranteed that that historical, the history would be accurately passed down. I mean, he’s God, He can do that. He can overrule our errors. And so He can guarantee the accuracy of what those stories were that were passed down. 

BOB: All right. So one final point we haven’t hit. Why on earth would anybody want to say that these days were indefinite periods of time? Why not just say it’s obvious. God did this. It was a miracle. God created mankind. The reason that the Jewish people rested on the Sabbath, on Shabbat, was because it was the seventh day. And so they rest. They don’t rest in indefinite period of time. Why in the world would they want to say that? 

DAVID: One word—evolution. 

BOB: Because they have been convinced that the theory of evolution, which is contrary to Scripture, is somehow fact. 

DAVID: It’s true and the Bible is not, which is essentially what they’re saying. 

BOB: Well, they have to manipulate the Bible to fit evolution.

DAVID: What they’re doing is they’re manipulating their ideas about the Bible. That’s for sure. And we could actually take a look at all that stuff if you want to. 

BOB: These people are called theistic evolutionists. And we could have another one about that. So maybe we’ll pick that up on the next one. But in in the meantime, let’s all keep grace in focus. Amen.

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On our next episode: a continuation of today, can the creation account be harmonized with materialistic evolution? Please join us again and let’s keep grace in focus.