I could do a lot in six days, but create the entire world, everything in it, and everything beyond it? That seems like a tall task! After all, any natural process that we can witness takes time. Of course, my power pales in comparison to God’s. Still, I wonder: what if it took God a really, really long time to create the world? After all, Peter did say that a day is like a thousand years to the Lord. On the other hand, what if it was all in an instant and Moses just described it in six days to make it easier to read? Is there any way to know for sure if God created the universe in six literal days?
What if I told you there’s one phrase you have, perhaps, read over and over again that solves this biblical mystery? It’s a solution hiding in plain sight. By the end of this study, you will know, beyond a reasonable doubt, if the creation story in Genesis is history or mystery.
What Does the Bible Claim?
The easiest way to get to the bottom of this question is to go directly to the source. What does Genesis actually say about how long God took to make everything? In chapter one, we get a breakdown of the six days of creation. God is in the beginning, and He starts with a blank canvas.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then 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. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.
Genesis 1:1–5
Moses describes each day of creation with something like, “the evening and the morning were this day.” He does that for six days, and then, God rests on day seven.
Moses speaks plainly and does everything in his literary power for us to understand him. God creates light, and the period of light on earth is named Day. Once we know very explicitly what he means by “day,” he uses that term to describe the time God takes creating.
Even the way we say it gives context clues to what Moses means. When we say the evening and the morning were the first day, the way that we structure this sentence clues us in on what we are saying. Stick with me for a moment. Were is a past tense verb and requires a subject and a predicate (for those of you who remember Schoolhouse Rock 😊). That’s what we find. “The evening and the morning” are the subject of the sentence. Whatever, therefore, happens after our verb both describes our subject and is described by our subject. After all, “were” links the two ideas. After the verb is our number, the first day. So, a “day” in creation is light and darkness that has a morning and an evening. If I’ve lost you, here’s where I pick you back up. Simply put: Moses is specific with what he is describing. The creation account is very clear that God creates the universe during six sets of darkness and light that begin and end with an evening and morning on planet earth. The same chapter of the Bible defines a period of evening and morning as a day. These were, therefore, 24-hour days.
“But,” I hear you say, “What if Moses means something different? What if he uses the word in many different ways? What if he is speaking figuratively here? How do we know what Moses means?”
Is Moses Consistent with His Words?
These are good questions, so let’s tackle them. When we find the answers, not only will we have more confidence that there are only 24-hour periods taking place in Genesis 1 and 2, we’ll also understand a bit more on how to study Scripture to draw out meaning.
Is Moses consistent with the word day? Genesis is not the only book he authored. By God’s inspiration, Moses wrote the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. If Moses talks about creation again, then we can use this new passage to see if he’s talking about a vague amount of time or a literal amount of time.
In the book of Exodus, Moses is writing about his own lived experiences, so we can assume that he has a pretty personal connection to the information he’s sharing. After leading the Israelites across the Red Sea, he goes up Mount Sinai, and receives instructions from God—rules about how to live, govern, and maintain holiness as God’s chosen people on earth. In Chapter 31, God is beginning to give rules for a very important Hebrew practice: the keeping of the Sabbath. On the seventh day of the week, the Israelites were to put work aside, rest, and focus on God. Why seven days? God explains:
It is a sign between Me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed.
Exodus 31:17
If Moses were to be making a new case for how long God took to create the heavens and the earth, this would be a place to do it. Six ages, six eons, six eras—there are any number of ways to present that God created for six, “whatevers,” and rested on the seventh. Instead, God says that He created the universe in six days, and the Israelites were to work for six days. The week was measured in days from Sabbath to Sabbath, not in years, eons, or eras.
Moses writes in Genesis 1 and Exodus 31 that God spent six days creating. So, back to our counterclaim: Moses said days, but meant something different. Does that hold up? When analyzing text by the same author, we make a reasonable statement that if they say the same thing in different places, they aren’t going to contradict themselves with what they mean.
Let’s imagine King Henry the VIII of Great Britain is throwing a giant party and brings in a servant to help him shop. He says to the servant, “Here are six golden coins. I want you to go out and buy six chickens to feed the party.” The royal historian records this interaction, and then records, “The servant went to the market. When he arrived, he noticed the chickens were one gold coin each, and so he bought six chickens with the gold coins he was given and returned to the king.” It would be silly of me to come in afterwards and claim that the royal historian meant that Henry gave his servant six thousand (or six billion) gold pieces, or that they did not use money at all, and instead the gold coins represented bartering. I can make claims about what I am reading, but they cannot be correct if I do not pay attention to the specific information in front of me.
Moses talks about days in the creation, and in Genesis 1, he describes them as periods of light and dark affecting earth and having an evening and a morning. No other event on earth follows this pattern except for a 24-hour day. He then uses this passage in a descriptive way to explain the way the Sabbath is to be kept. Moses is consistent: Creation happened in six days.
Is Moses Speaking Figuratively?
Well, what if Moses was writing about the whole creation figuratively, using that imagery as a cultural framework for the Sabbath? After all, those of us in the United States often use the story of George Washington and the cherry tree to illustrate his honesty and encourage honesty in others, even though George Washington was not, in reality, a lumberjack.
Was Moses being poetic and figurative when describing the creation of the universe? If so, it would create a major obstacle to saying with confidence that creation took place over six days. Poetry is not meant to be read the same way as history, so if Moses were writing poetically, perhaps there are no literal days at all. That would seem like a perfect silver bullet to destroy the idea of six literal days.
The problem is that there is no evidence that this passage is poetic. Moses did write songs, and some of them are even preserved in the book of Psalms. But reading poetry into a text does not make it poetry. The simple fact is that Genesis 1 is not written like a poem. Its structure and function are narrative, just like the accounts of Noah or the tower of Babel.1 There is no meter, no stanza structure, and nothing in the style of the text that signals poetry. Whatever people’s motivation is for hoping that Genesis 1 and 2 are poetic and figurative, Moses did not write the creation account as poetry. And once we allow Genesis 1 and 2 to be arbitrarily labeled as figurative, there’s no clear stopping point, and every passage in Scripture becomes subject to personal preference rather than authorial intent.
What About Peter?
Ok, so Moses hasn’t swapped genres, but what if we had a passage that claims, beyond a shadow of a doubt, consistent with the rest of Scripture, that God doesn’t work with time the way that we do, and even talks about it with similar language? Yeah, it’s right here:
But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
2 Peter 3:8
Sure, Moses says day, and means a 24-hour period in other passages, but according to Peter, a thousand years is a day to God. And now we know that the Bible has to remain consistent, just like Moses has to remain consistent. What if Moses was never wrong about the time, he was just talking about one of God’s 1000-year days?
Just like with Moses, we need to establish the genre and context of this book and passage. 2 Peter is a letter, and it’s being written to Christians dealing with real problems thousands of years after Moses. In chapter two, false teachers and prophets are making the Christians’ lives a lot harder with what’s being taught. When we begin chapter 3, Peter starts reassuring them that God is consistent in His promises about judgment. He is asking them to remain faithful even though it’s difficult right now.
When verse 8 enters the conversation, it’s not as a huge statement on how to read the Scriptures; it’s a personal reassurance for Peter’s audience that God is bigger than the issues ahead of them. When God is beyond time, we can trust that He is not going to forget about what He promised, that He will return in judgment, and that these Christians will receive their reward. God is eternal, and is outside of time, but that doesn’t mean that Peter is trying to uproot what has already been written.
If we look a little deeper, we find something that continues to prove this point. In the paragraph above where we just read, Peter says this:
[Scoffers will be] saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
2 Peter 3:4–7
This is the context of our previous passage: the judgement that is reserved for false prophets. He is using creation as an example in his letter. God’s word is being shown as an extension of His power, and to describe this Peter talks about the way that God’s words created the universe, and those same words make promises that He intends to keep. If we suggest that Peter thinks Moses is being figurative when talking about the creation, how can we also claim that Peter is taking Moses at his word here? Can Moses be wrong and right at the same time? Either Peter needs to do more studying, or Peter believes in the creation as Moses describes it.
The word of God is the best authority on the word of God, and it is consistent with itself. When Moses wrote down how God created the earth, he deliberately wrote a specific account the way the Spirit intended it to be written. Is the Bible trustworthy? Absolutely, and we can trust it when it says that an almighty God did the impossible and created our universe in 6 days.
- To study this deeper, see “The Hermeneutics of Adam: A Figurative Approach to Genesis 1 and the Historicity of Adam” in Answers Research Journal. ↩︎