The efficacy of such atoning sacrifices depended implicitly upon the recognition that death was God’s judgment upon sin. The death of any of God’s creatures containing the “breath of life” and the “living soul” (Gen. 1:21; 7:22) — and this includes at least all the higher land animals — was therefore not God’s natural order in His “very good” original created world (Gen. 1:31). Animal death, as well as human death, entered the world only when man brought sin into the world (Rom. 5:12). This is one very cogent reason that Bible-believing Christians should reject the concept of long geological ages with unnumbered billions of animals (even presumed human-like creatures) suffering and dying in the process of evolution, struggling for their existence and seeking to be among the fittest who would survive. For, if death preceded sin, death is then not the penalty for sin, and Christ’s death paid no penalty for sin and was without purpose.
Now, although man indeed is still to exercise dominion over the animal kingdom, and though he does indeed have the right to use animals for food and other needed purposes, even when it involves their death, God still cares for the animals, and so should we. This is made especially clear in the divine monologue at the climax of the Book of Job, when God — instead of dealing with the mystery of human suffering as debated throughout the preceding chapters of the book by Job and his friends — dealt exclusively with the evidences of His creation and His providential care of all His creatures. He “causeth it to rain on the earth, where no man is” and “provideth for the raven his food” (Job 38:26, 41). He has “given the horse strength” and enabled the eagle to “make her nest on high” (Job 39:19, 27). Christians have no business participating in animal or nature worship, but, likewise, they have a clear command to wisely use and manage nature and animal kind.
Finally, of the great Kingdom age yet to come, God says:
In that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground: And I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely (Hos. 2:18).
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord (Isa. 65:25).
In any case, the biblical dominion mandate, giving man dominion over the animals, is far more of a problem for old-earth creationists than for young-earth creationists. If animals (even modern animals) have been living and dying on the earth for millions of years before man was created, the very concept of human dominion over them becomes essentially trivial, if not ridiculous. What would be the point of man’s exercising stewardship over the animals for a few thousand years when they had gotten along very well without him for a hundred million years!
The Length of the Seventh Day
Many progressive creationists make what they think is a major point against the “literal day” teaching of Genesis 1 by noting that the account of the seventh day does not end with the usual formula (e.g., “the evening and the morning were the sixth day”). This, they argue, shows that the seventh “day” never ended, and has, therefore, been going on for several thousand years, as God continues to “rest” from His work on the first six days. Then they go on to infer that, therefore, the first six days were likewise periods of long duration.
This is specious reasoning. We have already shown in some detail that God has defined each “day” (Hebrew yom) of creation week to mean precisely what we mean when we use the word “day” in ordinary conversation (see especially Gen. 1:5 and Exod. 20:8, 11), and this very nebulous argument cannot obviate such normal and unambiguous meanings as God has recorded throughout the Scriptures.
Furthermore, the text clearly says that God “rested” (past tense), not “is resting.” The fact that “He rested on the seventh day” (Gen. 2:2) says nothing about what He did or did not do on the eighth day or ninth day. His “seventh-day rest” is mentioned specifically because every seventh day was henceforth to be kept as a memorial of the completion of His work of creating and making all things, not because He is now forever resting.
As a matter of fact, He is not resting. As soon as His work of creation was complete, He began His work of conservation, “upholding all things by the Word of his power” (Heb. 1:3; see also Col. 1:17; 2 Pet. 3:7; etc.). In addition, as soon as sin entered the world and God pronounced His curse on “the whole creation” (Gen. 3:19; Rom. 8:20–22), He also began His wondrous work of redeeming, restoring, and reconciling all things. No wonder the Lord Jesus Christ said: “My father worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17).
There is one other important fallacy in this long-day argument. It contradicts its own premise. In order to put the geological ages of the evolutionist into the six days of creation, the old-earth “creationists” must assume that the seventh day of creation week is still going on. Yet the Bible says that on that day God rested from all His work of creating and making all things. That is, the process of creation and manufacture, which God had used during the six days, is no longer in operation.
The problem, however, is that the very existence of these supposed geological ages is based on the premise of uniformitarianism — that is, that there is full continuity of the natural processes of the present world with those of the prehistoric world and that “creative” (read “evolutionary”) episodes are still occurring. Both the sequences and also the duration of the geological ages are based on uniformitarianism, which is an invalid premise if God is really resting in this age from His processes of creating and making all things during the “six ages” of the creation “week.”
It is one thing simply and honestly to reject the Genesis record as non-historical, as the out-and-out evolutionists do. It is another thing altogether to profess to believe in the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible, and then to so distort its meaning as to make it say something its divine Author was at specific pains not to say! The apostle Peter issues a severe warning against those who would “wrest” the Scriptures for their own purposes (2 Pet. 3:16).
Theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists have written book after book attempting to find ways of explaining away the clear teaching of God’s Word that all things were created only several thousand years ago. This is nothing new; it has been going on for hundreds of years. One can force the Bible to say that black is white and up is down, if he changes the meaning of its words to suit his fancy.
The fact remains that, if the Bible is allowed to speak for itself, it teaches that God made everything in heaven and earth in six solar days several thousand years ago. It would be impossible to say this any more clearly and explicitly, assuming that was the intended meaning, than in the words and sentences actually used. When every passage in the Bible dealing with early earth history is carefully examined, it will be found that the whole Bible, with no exception, teaches this truth. There is no hint anywhere in Scripture of evolution or long ages. Those who teach these ideas read them into the Bible, not in the Bible.
1 Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf Publ., 1973), p. 21.
2 Stephen Jay Gould. “Fall in the House of Ussher,” Natural History (Nov. 1991), p. 16.
3 James Barr. “Why the World was Created in 4004 BC: Archbishop Ussher and Biblical Chronology,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (Volume 67), pp. 575–608.
4 Gould, “Fall in the House of Ussher,” p. 16.
5 H. C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1950), p. 130.