If you don’t read the creation account in the Bible carefully you can form a false idea of what it actually says. It is a widely held belief that the Bible teaches that God created the entire universe in six days about 6,000 years ago. But is this really what it teaches? We need to take a careful look both at what the Bible says and what it doesn’t say.
The first two chapters of Genesis describe God’s work of creation. It can be divided into three parts.
The first verse simply contains a statement that God created the heavens and the earth. It gives no details about the steps involved or how long it took.
Genesis 1:2 to 2:3 gives a detailed description of one part of this creation, the world we live in. It took six days and was followed by a day of rest. All this took place during the creation in the first verse.
Man was created on the sixth day and the rest of chapter two is a detailed description of his creation.
The account of the six days in which our world was created begins with this statement:
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The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
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Our planet already existed at the beginning of the first day. It is described as being in darkness and covered by water. The six days do not describe the actual creation of our earth but its transformation from a chaotic condition into one which supports life.
We are not told whether the earth had just been created or had existed for some time. It is possible that it had originally been created perfect but its condition at this time was one of the effects of Satan’s rebellion. If this was the case then the six days were a restoration of the earth to its former state. The Bible ends with the creation of a new earth to replace on that had been damaged by sin. Perhaps it begins the same way.
The six days only describe what happened on earth and tell us nothing about the rest of the universe. The sun was already in existence on the first day because the earth began receiving light from it then. But we don’t know whether the sun was created on the first day or whether it existed before that but there was some barrier which kept its light from reaching the earth.
Genesis 1:14 seems to contradict this.
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And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth.
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But if you read it carefully you will find that it doesn’t actually say anything about the creation of the sun and the moon. It only says that God made lights in the sky, not that he created the bodies that produced these lights. The presence of light shows that the sun already existed so there must have been some kind of cloud cover which kept the sun from being seen but still allowed its light to reach the earth. This was now removed so that the sun, moon, and stars could now be seen.
The Bible clearly teaches that the world as we know it and all life on it were created in six days. The fossils we have found aren’t millions of years old as some believe, but were formed as a result of the worldwide flood in Noah’s time. We aren’t told whether or not the rest of the universe was created at the same time.
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