How do we reconcile the poetic language of Genesis with the scientific evidence of earth’s age? This episode takes a thoughtful approach to answer this age-old debate. Listen in as we unravel the creation hymn’s structure and its potential origins, discuss God’s immense creative power, and reflect on the significance of each day of creation as laid out in the scriptures. With compelling insights into the intended relationship between man and creation, this episode is a captivating exploration of the wonders of life and the grand design behind it.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 02 :
Most people believe that there is a God. They believe that He exists, that He’s out there somewhere, whether they believe in Him or not. But strangely, most people have never considered the consequences of that belief. If God exists, and if he created the world and everything in it, then that raises a really fascinating question. Why did he do it? It’s inevitable. You have to face this question. Somewhere in time, God arrived at a decision, maybe even a series of decisions that led to all this we see. Why did he do it? Why did he create the earth? Why did he create the heavens? Why did he create man? What we see here, you know, is no accident. We haven’t figured out yet how to create life on purpose. That is, how to create life from something that’s not alive. And yet there are those who persist in believing that life is an accident. It just sort of happens somewhere, sometime, and yet we can’t make it happen on purpose. Oh, we create life, yeah, but we do it by putting two forms of life together to create a life. And when we do it, we create life of the same kind. By selective breeding of animals, we’ve created new breeds. God did not create cocker spaniels. Man did that by selective breeding of dogs. But no one has ever succeeded in breeding a dog and then creating something that’s not a dog. So back to my question. Why did God create all this? What is He up to? The Apostle Paul informs us that the invisible things of God can be understood through the creation, by the things that are made. So, maybe we should look there. The story of creation is in, of all places, the book of beginnings, Genesis. The first chapter of Genesis is really a marvelous piece of work. If you’ve never read it, you really should. But you should read that chapter in a special way. The first chapter of Genesis is a poem. It may even originally have been set to music. I suspect that it’s considerably older than the rest of Genesis. In fact, the story of Genesis is much older than the book itself. Tradition tells us that Moses wrote it, and there’s good reason to believe that he did. But that makes the book of Genesis much younger than any of the events it describes. In fact, 2,500 years or so passed from Adam until the story was actually written down in the form in which we now have it. Some scholars have made a case for Genesis having been compiled from earlier accounts in another language, but no record of those accounts has ever been preserved. There are those scholars who believe that basically Genesis was passed on, the story of Genesis, by oral tradition from one generation to another. And that’s really a pretty reliable means, by the way, of passing on stories through generations. Because in the old world, people had better memories than they do today. It’s hard to really imagine this, but people had better memories before the invention of printing. It’s not that we don’t have the capacity for it anymore. It’s just that since we don’t have the need for it, we don’t do it. In the old days, children were taught to memorize, and a lot of their lessons were learned that way. And that is the way much of history was passed on in early generations through populaces that were fairly low in literacy. That is, they knew their stories, but they didn’t know how to read, and they didn’t know how to write. But Moses knew how to write, and so did generations of people before him know how to write. There’s one theory, as a matter of fact, that because of the way certain things are said in Genesis, the construction of sentences and what have you, they believe that Genesis was actually compiled from earlier cuneiform documents that were originally in another language but were written down in a form in which they could be read and then copied over into Hebrew or translated into Hebrew at a later time. Well, Genesis 1, which is the passage in which I want to take you to, is quite well structured for memorization and recitation. Let me show you what I mean. If you have a Bible handy, you might want to follow along. If you’re driving your car, you better keep your eyes on the road. I’ll try to bring you along with us. Now, after an introductory statement, the first chapter of Genesis is divided into six parts. They are six days. There are several ways of looking at the six days of creation. One view is that God did it all, sun, earth, moon, stars, the universe, and man, all in six days from nothing. In other words, when just before Genesis 1-1, which they assumed to be about 6,000 years ago, there was nothing at this point in space. In fact, there was nothing at any point in space, nothing in the universe at all. And so God started from scratch and in six days made everything. And I suppose if one believes in a God who could create the universe, a universe that could be 15 billion light years across, with a blink of his eyes, with a big bang, then creating the earth in six days would really not be any big deal. But this poses a problem for people with access to physical evidence that shows that the Earth is not a few thousand years old. It’s hundreds of millions of years old. And if you go to people like that and you insist, oh, no, the Earth is only 6,000 years old, well, they look at you like you’re crazy. They find evidence in the rocks and the decay of radioactive materials that can date the formation of rocks. And scientifically, they just know better. Someone who decided he’d try to reconcile both these sets of information concluded, well, God created the earth 6,000 years ago, but he created rocks that looked like they were millions of years old. You got that? In other words, he created rocks that already had some of the radioactive decay gone, so that it would appear that they were much older than they really are. Well… The scientists may be wrong by a million years, give or take, but there’s really no necessity to postulate a God who deliberately misleads us with His creation. If God would deceive on that point, then I submit we can’t know anything at all about Him. If one thing in His creation can be a lie, then anything can, and you can’t rely on Him for anything. Now, there’s another point of view that considers the first chapter of Genesis as not science and not history. It is art. It conveys the truth in poetic imagery. Those who believe this would draw a distinction between truth and accuracy. And I’ll try to explain the difference between the two. There’s an old hymn, for example, you might have sung in church sometime. It’s called, I Am Bound for the Promised Land. It goes like this. On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wishful eye to Canaan’s fair and happy land where my possessions lie. I am bound for the promised land, I am, I am bound for the promised land. Oh, who will come and go with me? I am bound for the promised land. Now, I think everyone who ever has sung that song knows that there are symbols in this song. The Jordan River, for Israel, was the border between the wilderness and the promised land. It’s what they had to cross over to get into the land. Well, in hymn symbolism, it’s the border between this life and the next. We’re struggling along in this life, which is symbolized by the wilderness. And we want to cross into the promised land, which is called Canaan. And that’s a symbol for the kingdom of heaven. So the hymn expresses a truth in a way that accurate language just simply wouldn’t carry. It wouldn’t have the feeling. It wouldn’t carry the emotion. And one of the ideas behind music and poetry is that we convey imagery and emotion and feeling as well as simple words and logic. For some reason, poetic form and imagery prints on the memory better than prose. So if you want your children to memorize something, turn it into a poem. And poetry is easier to memorize if it’s broken into parts. Well, the first chapter of Genesis has been called the creation hymn. And I want to talk to you about the way it’s structured in the King James Version. The Hebrew Bible will have a very similar structure because it helps us, I think, to understand what the first chapter of Genesis is all about. We’ll go into that after these words.
SPEAKER 01 :
Just how great is God? Really? How much power is controlled by the creator of the universe? And what does he plan to do with it? To find out, request your free CD titled, How Great Thou Art. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
SPEAKER 02 :
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was chaotic and in confusion. And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God brooded upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day. And the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. This is really a marvelous piece of work. It’s beautiful poetry. It has powerful imagery in it. You can almost visualize the waters and the darkness and the Spirit of God brooding and flittering across the face of the waters. The Holy Spirit in the New Testament has said it’s like a dove. And it was a dove that Noah sent out of the ark to look to see whether there was any dry land or not. And so it is that the Spirit goes to and fro over the face of the waters and saying, where is there land? After the opening line, you have eight lines, each beginning with and in the authorized version. And each stanza of the poem ends with the formula, In the evening and the morning were the first day. So if you can visualize the earth covered with water, clouds down to the face of the water, thick clouds so thick that everything on the face of the earth is total darkness. and the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were over the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse heaven. And evening and morning were the second day. you have the impression that suddenly the clouds begin to rise. They rise higher and higher until finally there is an expanse between the waters below and the clouds, which are the waters above. I love the way this expresses what God is doing. God says, let there be an expanse in the middle of the waters and divide the waters from the waters, and it was so. He speaks the word, and it happens. Keep in mind that the word heaven used here simply refers to the sky above us. Only by a figure of speech, by the way, does the word heaven begin to apply to the place of God’s throne. In the language, it means the sky. And God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so. The visualization of this, of slowly land beginning to rise up from the depths of the sea, and to spread the waters from the waters, and then dry land rising higher and higher, really grabs the imagination. One moment there was none, and the next moment it’s there. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called seas. And He said, That’s good. God, at every step of the way, finishes a job, steps back, looks at it, and evaluates it, and decides it’s good. Here’s someone who likes his work, enjoys what he is doing. He’s planned the whole thing out, and he’s carrying out his plan. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth. And it was so. The earth brought forth grass and herbs yielding seeds, everything after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit whose seed was in itself after his kind. And God saw that it was good. It was good. All you have to do is take a ripe peach from the tree, take hold of it and split it in half and pop the seed out of it, and look at the color, smell it, enjoy the scent, bite into it, and enjoy the sweetness and the flavor. There is absolutely nothing that is quite like a ripe peach. And I think you and I could do that. And we can say to ourselves and to one another as we enjoy fruit, isn’t it good? And the realization that God Almighty, having created the first peach tree that ever existed, would himself taste of it and say, now that’s good. That’s exactly what I meant for it to be. That’s the color I meant. That’s the look I desire. What a marvelous thing to consider. And you know what else is beautiful about this is that he has given to man, we’ll come to man in a moment, but he has given to man the right and the freedom to also take what God has created and make something new out of it because the peaches that you and I can enjoy today are not the ones God created. They’re the ones we made. They’re the ones that man made out of the original stock. in which was the capacity to create even more and even better. And I think of a mind, I think of a God that says, I want to share creative power. I want others to be able to enjoy what I enjoy, because I enjoy my work. And why should man not be given the right to, if he can, improve on my work? And the evening and the morning were the third day. Someone in time past who was struggling with the idea of a seven-day creation, they decided, well, seven days is really too quick. Now, the Bible says a thousand years is like a day to God. And maybe then each day of creation was actually a thousand years. Well, really, it would require no more of God to do it in seven days than in 7,000 years. But the problem is the 7,000-year idea doesn’t match the rocks or the fossils either. And then there is this problem. Most of the stuff God created in day three can’t survive without the things he created in day five. You’d have 1,000 years in between the creation of the trees and the herbs and all that. and the creation of the insects that were needed to pollinate them and make it possible for them to procreate. No, no, that doesn’t work. And God said, verse 14 of Genesis 1, “‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and seasons and days and years. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so.” God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night, and he made the stars also. Now, this sounds like he didn’t even create the sun until after he had created the plants, and that seems, on the surface of it, unlikely. But it wouldn’t have mattered a lot if he’s doing it all in seven days. But what is generally thought when we come to this is that up until this time, first of all, the earth was covered with clouds so thick that it was dark on the face. And then the clouds rose and an expanse was created in between them. And this is the point in time where the clouds part and allow the great light of the sun and the lesser light of the moon to actually reach the earth and allow a viewer, if he were on the surface of the earth, to finally see the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And I agree. It is so beautiful to go out on a dark night and see the moon and see the stars. Actually, I like nights when there is no moon because of the incredible beauty of the heavens, of all the stars, and the Milky Way. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open expanse of heaven. And God created great whales and every living creature that moves. And I can see the whales coming rolling out of the water and coming back down with a great splash and playing and frolicking in the sea. And God created every living creature that moves, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. So the book of Genesis begins with a great celebration of life. And more and more we’re coming to understand how rare that life is. We tend to believe that there is life somewhere else in the universe, but if it is there, it is so far away that to all intents and purposes, we’re alone. Life is rare. Life is precious. Teach your children to love and cherish life because all around them, is a culture of death.
SPEAKER 01 :
I’ll be right back with more life after these words. If you would like to share this program with friends and others, write or call this week only and request your free copy of What Is God Doing? Number 3. Write to Born to Win, P.O. Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44. And please tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 02 :
And God said, Let the earth bring forth a living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after his kind. And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth after his kind, cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps upon the earth after his kind. And God saw that it was good. Now he’s starting to really have fun. The whole thing has been a great joy, I’m sure. The design work that goes into the plants, the insects, the birds, the sea life, it’s mind-boggling. If you think it’s simple, why don’t you sit down and draw up a plan for, let’s say, let’s draw up something very simple. Let’s get the plans together for a dog. That’s all, just a dog. All we’ve got to do is figure out how to make this creature that can run across the earth at very high speeds, can turn his head, spot a frisbee flying in over his shoulder, make all the mental calculations to meet that frisbee at a point in the air, leap and grab it and come back to the ground, and then come chasing back to you with the frisbee, wanting you to throw it again. Sure, just go ahead, sit down, and draw out your own design for it. And when you’re finished with the design, see what you can do about making it. because it’s a long way between imagining something and actually creating the bone and the sinews, the muscular structure that will make it work, and the nerves that connect things up to empower them so that they will work. The creation must have been a great joy, and the mind that is behind it, well, it staggers the imagination. And then God said, Let’s make man in our image. Let’s make man after our likeness. And let’s have man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him. Male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. You know, now we’re getting close to that question I asked at the beginning of the program. If you really believe that there is a God, And if you really believe that God created the earth and everything on it, why did he do it? Well, man seems to have been at the very focal point of it all. Man seems to have been the point of it all. Everything was designed to prepare to create an environment fit for man. Because man was then given dominion over the whole thing. And more important than that, man was made in the image of God. And God said, Look, I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the face of the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed. To you it shall be for food, and for every beast of the earth, and every fowl of the air, and to everything that creeps wherein there is life. I have given every green herb for meat. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. So from one point of view, the creation account in Genesis is not really about science or history. It’s about conveying the truth that God created the heavens and the earth. and conveying that truth in a way that carries feeling, emotion, understanding, that is moving, that creates awe, that causes one to want to know the one who made this creation and who started it all out. You know, it in no way diminishes God to believe that the heavens and the earth are a long-term project. He is the designer, he’s the architect, and he’s the power. Genesis calls on man to bow before the great architect and to cease from arguments about how he did it. Oh, we can study how he did it. We really want to know. When God was finished with all this, he did the most natural thing one can do when he is finished. He stopped. Actually, he rested. One New Testament writer says he rested and was refreshed. And that raises the question, does God get tired? Well, it seems unlikely, but I can identify with this in a way. What do you do when you’re finished with a project? Well, you stop. And very likely you stand back and look at what you’ve done. You want to enjoy it. And if you were doing a painting and you’d finished all your work and you set it up on the easel, you might pull up a chair and sit down and stare at it for a while to enjoy your work. God really liked his work. At every stage, he concluded it was good before he went on. And he pronounced the final picture very good. And thus, Genesis tells us, the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. Because in that day He had rested from all His work which He had created and made. And that brings me back to my original question. Why did he do it? Why did he create the universe? Why did he scatter stars from here to a spot 15 billion light years away? Why did he create the sun, the moon, the earth? And why did he put man on it? Did he have something in mind? Oh, yes. But what that is, we’ll have to wait for another time. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, you were born to win.
SPEAKER 01 :
The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560 White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at… 1-888-BIBLE44
How do we reconcile the poetic language of Genesis with the scientific evidence of earth’s age? This episode takes a thoughtful approach to answer this age-old debate. Listen in as we unravel the creation hymn’s structure and its potential origins, discuss God’s immense creative power, and reflect on the significance of each day of creation as laid out in the scriptures. With compelling insights into the intended relationship between man and creation, this episode is a captivating exploration of the wonders of life and the grand design behind it.
