Answers in Genesis

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Answers in Genesis is an apologetics (Christianity-defending) ministry dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ effectively.

On our YouTube channel, you’ll find answers to your most pressing questions about key issues like creation, evolution, science, the age of the earth, and social issues. We desire to train believers to develop a worldview based on the Bible and expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas and their implications.

You’ll hear from top teachers such as Ken Ham, Bryan Osborne, Dr. Georgia Purdom, Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, Dr. Tim Chaffey, Dr. Gabriela Haynes, Dr. Terry Mortenson, and more.

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Answers in Genesis

For more than 200 years, Christians have been trying to reinterpret the six days of Creation in Genesis 1 to make them align with millions of years. But every attempt has a fatal flaw.

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day” (Genesis 1:31).

“The sixth day.” What does that phrase mean to you? More than 200 years ago, Christians began to question whether this day truly was the sixth day, instead of the six millionth or six billionth day. They were responding to an idea, popularized in the late 1700s, that our planet and universe are much older than Scripture indicates. They wondered where millions of years might harmonize with the Bible. So they scrutinized Genesis 1 and reinterpreted the days of Creation Week in a variety of ways.

But they didn’t recognize that each of these attempts to insert long ages into Scripture had fatal flaws (even beyond the alarming fact that they tried to change the original intent of the language). Most notably, they place death, suffering, and disease long before Adam and Eve sinned.

Yet you will still hear varieties of these views. What are we to make of them? Is there any justification for changing the meaning of the Bible’s first chapter?

Many of these views deny the historical reality of the Bible’s earliest chapters. This is unacceptable because it contradicts the way biblical writers and the Lord Jesus Christ understood and taught them. Luke stated that Jesus was a descendant of Adam (Luke 3:38). If Adam were not a real person, this statement would be absurd. Paul also wrote about Adam (1 Corinthians 15:22, 45). Peter wrote about Noah and the Flood (1 Peter 3:20). Jesus spoke about Noah and the Flood (Matthew 24:37–38), and he said the first man and woman were created “from the beginning” (Matthew 19:4). If Adam and Eve were created after billions of years of history, then Jesus was not perfect, he was mistaken (or a fraud).

What about the positions that do not deny the historical reality of the events and people but add vast amounts of time to Creation Week? These positions fail as well.

The Fourth of the Ten Commandments instructed Moses and the Israelites to work for six days and rest for one. God explained the rationale: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day” (Exodus 20:11). If Creation Week lasted millions or billions of years, how could it possibly serve as the model for the work week described in the Ten Commandments?

Hebrew scholar Dr. Steven Boyd has conducted a statistical analysis of 522 Old Testament passages. He found that poetic and narrative passages could be categorized with a better than 99% accuracy based on the verb usage alone. Dr. Boyd’s analysis showed conclusively that Genesis 1 is narrative history, not poetry. This means the only way to interpret it properly is as history, looking for its straightforward, historical meaning.

The immediate context of each appearance of day in Genesis 1 conclusively establishes their length. Each day is marked by “evening and morning.” A day lasting millions of years would have far more than one evening and morning. Throughout the remainder of the Old Testament, when evening and morning are used together, they refer to a normal-length day.

Each day is also linked with a number (“first day,” “second day”). This construction occurs more than 300 times in the Old Testament, and with only a couple of potential exceptions, it always signifies a normal-length day.
Furthermore, in the original Hebrew, Genesis 1:31 states that the final day of Creation Week was indeed the sixth day. If millions of years had passed, then Day Six could not have been the sixth day.

Why do Christians question the length of the days in Genesis but nowhere else? They do not question how long the days were when Joshua marched around Jericho or when Jonah was in the great fish. The truth is that they are trying to find a way to make millions of years mesh with Scripture.

Yet every attempt to harmonize the Bible with long ages will always fall short. The meaning of the days in Creation Week is perfectly clear. Each day was the same length as our modern days. The sixth day truly was the sixth day.
— Dr. Tim Chaffey