This is a follow up to my last article
This is an unplanned article as I wanted to address it later on in the series but while it is fresh on the minds of those interested, I figure I need to clarify a few things. I plead with you to do your best to think outside of the prevailing narratives, six days vs. billions of years. These two narratives I am not addressing, so if one brings them into the discussion, they are failing to see what I am trying to reveal.
Three things are being accomplished with the seven day week. First, there should be no discussion about the days mentioned here being longer than a twenty-four hour period. As I said in my last article, the day is being described as a period of light and darkness. Everyone since the beginning of time knows that light and darkness makes a day.
Genesis also teaches us that it was God who created the seven day week. The week is not a creation of man. When God said, “let there be light”, in those words God was defining a day, a week and much more. There is also something significant about this week, and that was that God wanted to have his servants work six days and rest on the seventh.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Exodus 20:8-11
We cannot overlook something here. God is being described as working six days as a man and then resting as a man. When God is being described as behaving like a man, it is called anthropomorphism.
Definition:
anthropomorphism | ˌanTHrəpəˈmôrfizəm |
noun
the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object.
Commentary
“And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. Shavath, the primary idea of which is to sit still, depicts Elohim as desisting from his creative labors, and assuming a posture of quiescent repose. The expression is a pure anthropomorphism.”
Pulpit Commentary Genesis 2:2 / https://biblehub.com/commentaries/pulpit/genesis/2.htm
I asked that you search your bible for six days and find when it is used in context of creation. There you will find it is not used to tell us of the time it took for God to make the world, but rather to teach us to work six days and rest on the seventh.
These chapters have such beautiful writing because it is written to teach so much in such a little space and that is important for memorization. In the past the truth was passed on by stories. Using stories does not imply a made up fairytale, what it does mean it is written as an easy to memorize narrative.
We use things to help us remember all the time. We use outlines or acrostics to organize our thoughts. I believe that is what is going on here! Now you don’t have to believe this, but I think it would be narrow-minded not see it as a possibility. An outline gives us points which can be expounded upon. Let’s take the sixth day for example. We are told that on the sixth day God created all of the animals and then man. God can do anything, and this could happen in seconds. We are also told that Adam named all the animals and found that none were fit for a companion. God then put Adam to sleep and created a woman from his side.
There is are things that need to be seen here. There are tens of thousands of animal kinds that have lived on the earth. Even if Adam only had to name five thousand animals and only took ten seconds to do it, it would take about fourteen hours. Then Adam was put to sleep to allow God to extract a rib. God could have just slipped it out without Adam feeling it, but He didn’t. We would have to allow time for that to take place. Then God formed Eve from that rib. If you believe that the garden of Eden was done before God rested, then the garden had to be planted on the sixth day (Genesis 2:5). If the garden was planted on the sixth day, then why did God have to water the earth with a mist. Just a few days before this, the ground was covered with water, and that should have been sufficient. I hope you see by now that insisting that all this happened in the working hours of a day is pushing it. However, there is no need for this except for our instance on a dogma.
The account of what happened on day six could have taken a week or a month it did not have to occur in twenty-four hours. If you want to believe it did, that’s okay, but we don’t have to make that a significant point because time is not being discussed here as to how long it took.
I will close with this. I believe that the events, being outlined by the use of days, did not all happen within the one hundred and forty-four hours. However, it does not seem reasonable to suggest that the work God did from day one to day six would have taken millions or billions of years. We will see God created a very organized and in-synced system that requires things to come into existence in a relatively short time for it all to function.