Let’s Make A Deal
Some Christians just don’t quite trust the Bible, yet they turn around and blindly swallow the world’s philosophy. In a cowardly attempt to justify their faith anyway, they invent theories that allow them to keep half their faith in God and the other half in man.
One of the compromise theories some Christians use to try and accommodate evolutionary philosophy is to claim that God is still “resting” from his work; therefore the 7th day must be at least many thousands of years in length. Needless to say (but yet needful, for people don’t see this), there are a number of problems with that line of reasoning.
One: This theory ignores the language of the Hebrew textual pattern “evening and morning, the nth day”. Over and over it is repeated, making clear indication of solar days. As detailed in many other fine articles, whenever there is an ordinal along with “day”, it means a literal solar day. No translation I’m aware of uses terms like “evenings and mornings, the nth day” to give any leeway to there being more than one solar cycle per day.
Two: If the seventh day is thousands of years in length, then there were long ages in which there were plants without sunlight for example, and Adam had to be much older than the age given in the Bible (under one thousand). If people have trouble believing that anyone could live even a few hundred years, what will they do with this theory’s requirement on the lifespan of Adam? Thus, the day/age view is reduced to absurdity.
Three: The Bible clearly states that God is NOT still resting!
John 5:16-17 So the Jews began persecuting Jesus because he kept doing such things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father has been working until now, and I, too, am working.”As also the Decalogue states point blank, God rested on the seventh day, not the seventh age or epoch. Of course God is no longer doing the work of original creation, but that in no way requires that God is doing nothing at all.
Four: The “Sabbath rest” of God is not a time but a place:
Hebrews 3:18ff And to whom did he swear that they would never enter his rest, if not to those who disobeyed him? So we see that they were unable to enter because of their unbelief...So to use this scripture as somehow related to the length of creation days is completely without warrant by the context.
So the day/age approach simply doesn’t work, either scripturally or scientifically. Not only do we have plants without sunlight for long ages, but the order of creation is not the same as the order of evolutionary theory. There are other compromise theories, but for now I wanted to just look at this one. Suffice it to say that they all suffer from similar fatal flaws and poor exegesis and science.
Your view of the Bible has everything to do with what you believe. To view it as fables, allegories, nice moral tales, etc. is to make it a mere lump of clay that will take any shape you want. One cannot hold to inerrancy and contradictory theories at the same time, but that’s exactly what theories do that try to meld evolutionary philosophy with Genesis.