I recently heard a shocking statistic. Among the top 20 seminaries in the United States, only one teaches that the six days of creation are to be taken literally. Now I grew up in public school and was exposed to the “theory” of evolution and that the universe sprouted from a “big bang” some 15 billion years ago. I realize that most kids in the U.S. continue to be indoctrinated with this rhetoric today and many have not been offered a viable alternative from the Bible. For me, I just took these scientific “theories” for what they were – an attempt by non-believing scientists and educators to explain away God’s role in the creation of the universe. I knew what the Bible said about the subject and never really entertained these “theories” of evolution as worthy of consideration.

However, this statistic is particularly alarming because it is not being taught by the public schools and universities. The idea that schools designed to train men to be pastors and expositors of God’s Word are straying from biblical truth and allowing these scientific theories to have a place should be concerning to all of us. For every young person brought under the spell of our public education system, where will they go to find truth? If our pastors are not being trained to set the record straight from God’s Word, who will? I’m thankful for organizations like Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research who provide resources in this area, but am concerned that so many of our church’s leaders are not being taught the truth.

This is neither a scientific exercise nor a philosophical one. It comes down to whether we take the Bible literally (i.e. reading it with a literal-grammatical hermeneutic) and whether we accept it as authoritative. When we lose those two principles in our approach to God’s Word, we become free to let the text say what we choose and we then have the freedom to decide whether the text fits with what we already “know” about the world around us. Let me give you a few brief reasons why we can believe that the universe was created in six literal days:

1. A Day is a Day – when reinterpreting the passages in Genesis that describe the six days of creation, some scholars have tried to argue that the Hebrew word for day (yom – י֔וֹם) can mean an undefined period of time. Just like our English word day, that can be true. But we know two things about this word in both English and Hebrew – the word almost always means a literal, 24 hour day and we use the context to determine if it means something other than it's normal usage. There is no such indication in the text of Genesis.


2. A Day is an Evening and Morning – God in His infinite wisdom wanted to be sure that we viewed the word for day as a literal, 24 hour day. How do I know this? Because the writer of Genesis records specifically that “the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen 1:5). In fact, this statement is made for each of the days of creation. All of mankind for all of history has understood that each day consists of a daytime and nighttime. So, just in case we didn’t understand the word yom to mean a regular day, this extra description is given to help us view the day as literal.


3. Seven Days Make a Week – In Exodus, God is giving us the reason for having a Sabbath day of rest. His explanation is based upon a regular seven day week: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” (Exodus 20:11) God’s argument for a seven day week and a day of rest is based on His creation of the world in the course of six, literal, 24 hour days.

These are all arguments from the text itself and there are more that we could consider. Any first-year seminary student should be able to bring out these points and explain how the Bible clearly calls out six literal days of creation. Sadly, many of our pastors are no longer being taught to read and explain the Bible in this fashion, and many of those in our pews are not biblically literate enough to find these answers for themselves. May our pastors begin to wake up to the proper, literal reading of scripture and stop being informed by the culture and “theories” that taint their authority of God’s Word. The Bible is trustworthy, accurate, detailed, and still relevant even in our age of science. There is so much unknown in our scientific theories, but I do believe that (just like in archaeology) as we learn more and more that science will eventually confirm God’s truth. Until then, I'll choose to trust the Bible!