Did God Really Create in 6 Days?

In 1831, Charles Darwin began his 5-year expedition aboard the Beagle. While in the Galapagos Islands, he noticed the slight variations between species of finches on different islands. He concluded that these finches must have descended from a common ancestor and changed over time to survive in their specific environments. Darwin universally applied his theory of change, or evolution, to all life on earth which, he speculated, must have descended from a single common ancestor. In his Origin of Species, he supposed, “Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form…”. These words changed the world.

These words have also changed the church. Since the Darwinian revolution of the 19th century, many gallons of ink have been spilled by Christian theologians and pastors over the meaning of the word “day” in Genesis 1. Are we to believe that these 6 days of creation were ordinary days? Ancient church fathers like Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil of Caesarea struggled to understand why the creation took so long, suggesting instead that the Lord created all things instantaneously. But today, many sincere Christians struggle to believe that the earth could have been created so quickly contrary to the modern scientific consensus.

But Scripture, not the ever-fluctuating scientific consensus, is our “rule of faith and life…and the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined” (WCF 1:2&10). There is compelling internal evidence that Genesis 1 is an historic account of an actual event. First, hiding behind our English “and” is a Hebrew grammatical feature called the “vav consecutive.” We find it sprinkled some 50 times throughout Genesis 1-2:4. This literary device communicates chronology and sequence and is one of the hallmarks of an Old Testament historical narrative that is noticeably less common in the poetic wisdom literature of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon.

Second, while the Hebrew word “yom,” can refer to an indefinite period of time, as it does in Genesis 2:4, whenever it is joined to a numerical prefix (“first,” “second,” “third,” etc…) it is always in reference to a literal day.

Third, the perspicuity, or clarity of the text, demands a literal interpretation: “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Genesis 1:5). It’s as if Moses’ old hands are reaching up from the pages of Scripture to throttle the reader by the shirt collar as he pleads, “How can I possibly make this any clearer?” If you doubt that Genesis is a literal account of 6 literal days, what would Moses have to say, what else could he say, to satisfy your skepticism? In the end, Hebrews 11:3 helped me sort it all out: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

Fourth, finally and most importantly, since “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself,” (WCF 9), what does the rest of the Bible say about creation? Do other inspired authors interpret Genesis figuratively? At first these appear to be daunting questions, as God’s work of creation is cited hundreds of times throughout the Old and New Testaments. It may be God’s most frequently referenced act in redemptive history! But each and every time Scripture speaks of creation it does so literally, as an historical event that happened just as it is written in Genesis. The fourth commandment itself is built upon a literal rendering of six days of creation, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:11). Is the law of God also to be read figuratively? I think not. Or consider Jesus’ teaching on marriage drawn from his literal understanding of Genesis 1 and 2, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, (that’s Genesis 1:27!) and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh (that’s Genesis 2:24!)’” (Matthew 19:4-5, emphasis mine)? If Jesus didn’t treat Genesis’ creation account as a myth, poem, or allegory, we shouldn’t either. The only natural conclusion from the whole council of Scripture, what Hebrew shepherds and fisherman of old would have understood, is that a day is a day and Genesis 1-2 is a clear and accurate account of historical events that should be read and believed at face value.

Is it any wonder then that until the Darwinian revolution, a plain reading of the creation days in Genesis was the default, utterly uncontroversial view of the church and its most prominent leaders.
Martin Luther, in his Lectures on Genesis said, “We assert that Moses spoke in the literal sense, not allegorically or figuratively, that is, that the world, with all its creatures, was created within six days, as the words read.” John Cavin agreed in his commentary on Genesis, “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth… God himself took the space of six days, that he might invite us to the imitation of his example.” This was also view of our Puritan forefathers. In his Exposition of the Creed, William Perkins said, “The world was not made from eternity, but in the space of six days.” In A Body of Divinity, Thomas Watson said, “God could have made the world in an instant, but he did it in six days, that he might set us a copy to work six days and rest the seventh.” “Matthew Henry agreed in his Genesis commentary, “The age of the world… is not yet six thousand years.” The 9th question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism faithfully summarizes the Bible’s doctrine of creation: “The work of creation is God’s making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.”

So what? Why does our interpretation of the length of the creation days matter? It matters because it reveals our willingness to take God at his word and read the Scripture plainly, especially regarding doctrines deemed foolish by the world. It matters because God made us by the word of his power and redeemed us by the blood of his Son that we might “Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name…” (Psalm 29:2). God’s speaking all things into existence by the word of his power in the space of six days is simply more glorious than the gradual, imperceptible, trickling of the cosmos into being over endless years. “Let God be true though every one were a liar…” (Romans 3:4)