Six Days
May 26th, 2009 There was a portion of the original manuscript of Unlocking God’s Secrets that did not make it into the published book because the publisher was concerned that it would be so controversial in some Christian circles that they would not allow their flocks to read the rest of the book. He was probably correct in his assessment; however, there is another point that may have been even more important that I want to correct today.
By omitting the truth of that unpublished portion we may have inadvertently continued to push the unbeliever in God away from the total truth of His existence, because our silence in the matter once again made the atheist feel that since we Christians as a whole teach one thing that flies in the face of known and proven reality, anything else we say about the Bible must be taken with the utmost skepticism. Rather than beating around the bush, let me get right into the heart of the matter.
Up until 1950 most of the non believing scientists subscribed to what is known as the “steady state theory”, which basically taught that the universe as we know it had existed eternally. Everything changed with the idea of the “big bang theory.” This theory is widely held today as truth and is based on the thought that everything started at a particular point in time.
God told us in His very first sentence, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1. But what about believing and being adamant that God created everything in six 24 hour days? I will state here, much to the raised eyebrows of some of my believing friends, that God’s Word is always accurate, but our insistence on the days being made up of normal earthly 24 hours is less than rational and often extremely harmful, because it drives away people who otherwise might be brought into the light of Christ. Please bear with me as I explain.
First of all, common sense will tell us that the days could not have been our solar days, since the sun and earth were not even listed in the creation story until “days” two and three, and yet God talks about what happened on day one. There simply was no earth making a 24 hour revolution which is what our day is defined as. The earth did not exist. Period. Neither did the sun.
We need to also understand that the days could not represent our earthly thousand years, which some believers have tried to make fit, because once again, at the very beginning there were no earthly measures to even multiply by a thousand. As we have seen in our earlier blog articles, those six thousand years do come into play, but in relation to end time prophecy, not in relation to time prior to our calendar dating, or the time that is referred to by scientists as cosmic proper time or CPR.
Science, however, is now aligning itself with everything that God said all along. Science took a giant leap forward in 1915 when Albert Einstein stunned the world with what is now known as fact, that there are changes in time flow dependant on gravity and velocity. This difference in the passing of time is known in scientific circles as “time dilation.”
Most of us can understand how gravity affects our weight, but we haven’t come to grips with how it can slow down time. Science, though, has proven that it does. The other thing that affects time is speed. The easiest way to understand it is to visualize waves of sound or light going out from a central gravitational point in space. They don’t go in a straight line. They are “waves” because they go back and forth as they travel outward. The farther out they go, the farther back and forth they go in an increasingly widening arc. As they travel out, it takes longer to go a specific straight distance away from the original gravitational point because they are traveling ever and ever farther on their back and forth arcs. The end result is that in the second year they can only go half as far away from the starting point as they did in the first year. In the third year they go only half as far as they did in the second year. The reason again is that the farther out they go, the more back and forth on the wave arc they also have to go.
Our day is in reality a measure of distance. If the circumference of our earth were three times greater, and if the earth revolved at the same speed, it would obviously take three times longer to see the sun each revolution at any given spot on the earth as it does now. In that situation our day would be 72 hours long instead of 24 hours as it really is. The first CPR day, before there was an earth or sun, was also a matter of distance. It was a distance from the origin of the “big bang”, or to state it simpler, the origin of the first explosion of energy. This is the point at the beginning when “God spoke” everything into being.
Scientists know that the “big bang” was an explosion of radiation, the basis of all forms of light. It has actually been named cosmic background radiation (CBR) and it was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965. It is the only source of radiation that has existed since creation.
At the moment creation occurred, we know that the first “expulsion” of universe was a million million times hotter than black space is today, and it was a million million times smaller than it is today. It was a burst of energy beyond compare, and since, according to science, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it had to come from somewhere. That “somewhere” was the voice of God. God spoke and everything was created.
But getting back to the six days, the energy traveled out, and according to Einstein’s formula, E=MC2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared), mass or matter was created out of that energy. Actually it took a massive amount of energy to create a tiny amount of matter. So, matter was being created from “God spoke”, which scientists look at as the initial burst of energy.
The main thing to understand is that the first cosmic day the energy, or light, traveled twice as far as it did the second cosmic day, so, since a CPR day was measured in distance, as ours is, the first cosmic day was twice as long as the second cosmic day, which in turn was twice as long as the third cosmic day, etc. Stated another way, since the energy traveled a shorter distance away from the source the second day, due to the widening back and forth arc, the second day was shorter by one half.
Genesis 1:3 says, “And God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness He called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day.”
Scientists tell us that after what they call the big bang (when God spoke), light did in fact separate from darkness, as electrons bonded to atomic nuclei, just as Genesis states. Galaxies started to form during this period, which took eight billion years. So eight billion years was the length of the first day of cosmic proper time (CPR).
The second day, therefore, would have lasted four billion years, since it would have had to have been about half the length of time of the first CPR day. During this second day, God’s Word tells us He formed the firmament which He called “sky.” The scientists tell us that during this four billion year period the Milky Way was formed, which obviously is our sky. God’s Word was correct, as it always is.
During the third day, which lasted about two billion years (half the second day), the Bible says that the earth was formed with dry land and water, and vegetation began. Surprise, surprise, the scientists as one voice tells us that this is exactly what happened during this two billion year length of time.
During day four, in verses 14 through 19, God says, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night.” He goes on to talk about the sun, moon and stars. The scientists tell us that during this one billion year period, the fourth CPR day, the earth’s atmosphere became transparent, so the sun, moon, and stars were now visible from earth. The scientists and God are in total agreement again.
The Bible now tells us in verses 20 through 23 that God created fish and birds on the fifth day. Interestingly, that is exactly what scientists say happened during the next five hundred million years, the fifth CPR day.
The two hundred and fifty million years leading up to the beginning of Jewish dating, which would have been the sixth CPR day and the sixth day in the Bible, according to scientists were the years in which the large land mammals and humans first came on the scene. As we would expect, those are the exact things God said He created on the sixth day.
God’s Word is exact. Every time. And science is unwittingly proving that fact. Scientists say that creation started at one point in space with a burst of energy that, according to their own laws, had to have come from an outside entity. They further state that the creation, or big bang, occurred about sixteen billion years ago, which they themselves break up into six cosmic proper time days. The big bang was God speaking, and those six CPR days are God’s original six days. We just didn’t know it until now.
Understanding the truth of the six days of creation does not lesson the miracle at all. In fact, for me, seeing the complexity of God’s plan to create us, His ultimate object of love, makes the miracle of creation even more astonishing and awe inspiring. And by having a better understanding of this phenomenal miracle of creation we just might be able to eliminate a stumbling block of many unbelievers and bring those we love who are in the dark into the glorious light of the love of Jesus Christ, who “by Him and for Him all things were created.” Colossians 1:16.
May 27th, 2009 at 6:47 am
Ouch! My brain hurts now!
He is too marvelous, too wonderful for comprehension!
I feel small…
May 27th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Wow. This really helps.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:44 am
May I ask a couple of questions?
Following your line of thinking, how would the vegetation created on day 3 thrive for 2 billion years without the sun, which was created on day 4?
Did the fish and birds created on day 5 live for the equivalent of 500 million years without death?
If sin (and death) entered the world through Adam, none of those creatures could have died until after the fall.
I think I would have to respectfully disagree on this one. Not that disagreement was unexpected.
Those who developed the model of millions of years were doing so with the underly bias that the Biblical account is not plausible fact. They need another way of explaining it, thus they look at the data from their own lens, one that rules out Scripture.
The record in Genesis is pivotal for laying the groundwork of the whole gospel. It all begins there. Why attempt to make the Biblical record line up with man’s theories - theories built on the very assumption that the Biblical record is false?
May 28th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I hope you might permit me one additional thought on the second question.
If the Biblical account and evolutionary science are in agreement with regard to length of time, would you also follow evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record?
The time frame of millions of years is based on interpretation of fossil data. Again, in the case of evolutionary science, that interpretation is made with the presupposition that the Biblical account of a worldwide flood can not be a valid starting point. Creation scientists look at the same data and see overwhelming confimation of a worldwide flood. Again, different lenses.
If you are saying that the Biblical account and fallible man’s evolutionary view of millions of years actually line up with one another, would you also agree with their fossil interpretation that animals were dying for millions of years prior to man? (Again, a problem with death entering the world through sin.)
It seems that at some point, the two views must certainly collide.
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:05 am
I don’t really know whether this time discussion is exact or the full truth; I do know that it makes sense and add’s to our ability to meet the skeptical minds of those who doubt the Truth. Ultimately, I can only thank you for the information and continue to trust that it comes from God in and through you, Bob.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for writing.