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Adam knew the universe was created in six evenings and mornings or he would have told his descendants otherwise.

Genesis is history, not science.  Genesis 1 says that Adam was created the sixth day according to Genesis 1. God rested the seventh day. Does it make any sense that God would leave Adam in the dark about the creation time period? There are two reasons in the text that show that Adam would have known the time period – the Sabbath day and Eve.

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”

Gen. 2:1-3. The Sabbath was instituted before sin came into the world. And unlike the month, the day, and the year, there is no satisfactory astronomical explanation for a seven-day week.[1] Imagine this conversation between God and Adam.

Adam: “Why is the seventh day a day of rest, Lord?”

God: “Well, I’m resting.”

Adam: “You get tired?”

God: “No, but I’ve got to teach you to rest.”

Adam: “So you rested the seventh day to teach me to rest the seventh day?”

God: “Well, . . . it wasn’t exactly the seventh day . . . “

Adam: “So what day was it if it wasn’t the seventh?”

God: “Um, it was more like one day after about 15 billion years.”

Adam: “Huh?”

God: “Yeah, it just didn’t make sense to do it all too quickly.”

Adam: “So what about this six days followed by one day of rest? If it’s not because you worked six days and then rested, what was the Sabbath you set up based on?”

God: [Silence]

Adam: “Okay, so you just thought you ought to tell me that you worked six days and rested the seventh for my good, right?”

God: “Right, of course, I did.”

Adam: “But why’d you have to lie about it? Why couldn’t you just tell me to rest every seventh day no matter how long it took you to create the universe? You’re God; you have no need to make up something to state something as a law for me to follow.”

God: “Uh , , , ,”

Yes, that’s the God that so many Christians, including seminary professors and so-called Christian scientists, believe in – a God who took billions of years to create everything, then lied to Adam (and Moses), treating Adam like he was a fool. According to so many believers, the God who told Adam about six days of creation followed by a seventh day of rest was actually the God who took 15 billion years to make everything then told his supreme creation that it only took six days in order to teach him something. When all God had to do was say, “Son, you should rest every seventh day because it’s good for you; you’re human, you need rest.” If the Sabbath is based on God working six days and resting the seventh, instead of something he wanted for us because it’s good for us, then the whole point of the Sabbath disappears. Why the invention? Why the symbolism based on a reality that’s not real?

Some allegories can be symbolic of something moral or spiritual without being based on real events, like Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella. But we read such stories knowing they’re not real history, and they are not told by the Creator of all reality. Yet we learn something from the story a human being invented. In the case of the creation story, because the history is told of the actions of the ultimate Creator of reality and truth and the person in whose likeness man was made and whose work week should be reflected in man’s work week, then it’s no longer an allegory if there’s nothing in reality to reflect. Without the literal six days of creation, this particular allegory disappears. The allegory falls apart because the narration doesn’t reflect any part of reality. If the creation story of Genesis 1 is mere allegory, then it is not the word of the true and living God; it’s merely man’s attempt to make sense of his world. It’s man’s made-up version of what it’s all about. It’s a testament to his creative literary ability and nothing else. All the chiastic arrangement, the correlation of the first and fourth days, the second and fifth days, and the third and sixth days are just nice poetry. The idea that man was made for something greater, the arrangement and pattern of creative activity that points to something greater about man over the rest of creation, that man is made for something higher – all of it disappears.

However, it does fit fine within the evolutionary framework, for man, the supreme end product of evolution, creates his own meaning out of the brute factuality of the world. Therefore, Genesis for modern man is great poetry, but that’s all. A testament to the mind of man, the new sovereign of the earth and, perhaps also, the heavens. The gradual, incremental, almost imperceptible, random changes occurring in the earth and its biology distance any Creator, if there even is such a thing, to a position very far from man – so far that He becomes a vague, impractical idea not really worth pursuing. The really important work is discovering the reality of how things came to be and how to change them to preserve our position in our ecosystem. The idea of the incarnation, a supernatural invasion of earth by some God who had initiated gradualist evolution as the means of development and progress on earth, is out of character with how he did things in the creation by evolution. So when the Christian compromises on the issue of the six-day creation, this is what he’s attempting to compromise with – the deification of man and dethronement of God. We wouldn’t want to offend that, would we?

There’s another thought process which this thinking parallels – that of the scoffers mentioned in II Peter, who say “all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” II Peter 3:4. How many Christian students have been enticed by this doctrine of gradualist evolution? How many have lost faith in a scripture that doesn’t “reflect reality,” but is merely good poetry? It’s a reversal; therefore, Christians, who are taught to respect truth and depreciate myth, are told that with respect to Genesis 1: “Oh, the bible is all true, except for Genesis 1, it’s just poetry on the level of other myths invented by other religions.” And we expect them to stay with the Christian faith when the other side says, “We give you scientific truth! Why would you delude yourself with fairy tales, when you can have the truth?” That’s what Christians used to tell pagans. Now, because of the compromise of the six-day creation, that’s what pagans tell Christians. Yet we continue to promote the idea that bible-believers can live with a denial of the six-day creation.

[1] See Institute for Creation Research article, William J. Bauer, PhD., “Creation and the Seven-Day Week”, http://www.icr.org/article/creation-seven-day-week/, accessed on September 26, 2015. There are attempts to show other reasons for the institution of a seven-day week, but the closest one gets to an astronomical basis is the fact that “a week is 23.659% of an average lunation, or 94.637% of an average quarter lunation.” Wikipedia definition of “Week,” “Definition and Duration,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week, accessed on September 26, 2015.