Originally posted by sonhouse
Well, that is actually interesting.
Do you put the universe at 14 bill like science says?
Do you believe in a 4 or 5 billion year old Earth?
I didn't know anyone who used the bible to come to that conclusion.
What biblical source to you refer to as per the age of everything?
I though old Gen was it. Other books too?
If you took the 4.5 billion y ...[text shortened]... old Earth seriously and added in the 6 day tale, you come up with 750 million years per day.....
You mean you haven't seen RJHinds and myself debate this in the past ?
What is important to know, I think, is that the enemy of God had a pre-history backround before the creation of man. How extensive his kingdom was, I do not know. How long this kingdom lasted, I do not know.
Speculations of the age of the universe will come and go and change with the revisions of science theories. What is important to the understanding of the Bible, I think, is to realize that before Adam was created Satan had a glorious, pre-adamic existence and authority. And it ended in a divine judgment.
I believe this judgment, this cataclysmic depriving of his world was the reason the the earth was seen by the seer, in the second verse of Genesis, as waste and empty.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But the earth became waste and emptiness, and darkness was on the surface of the deep." (Genesis. 1:1,2 Recovery Version)
The two words in Hebrew used to translate into
"waste and emptiness" form a kind of expression the equivalent sound we could grasp by the expressions -
"topsy turvy" or
"helter skelter" .
The words used
together in this fashion elsewhere in the Old Testament are used to describe a divine overthrow of judgment.
The note on Genesis 1:2 of the
Emphasized Bible expresses this.
Heb: tohu wa-vohu. Evidently an idiomatic phrase, with a play on the sound (" assonance" ). The two words occur together only in Is. xxxiv. 11; Jer. iv.23; examples which favour [sic] the conclusion that here also they describe the result of previous overthrow. Tohu by itself is found in several other texts (Deu.xxxii.20; Job xii.24; Ps. cvii.40; Is. xxiv.11; etc.).
Following this exegesis, I believe that between the verses saying God created the heavens and the earth in verse 1 and the earth being seen as
tohu va-vohu in verse 2 is some unknown and unspecified interval of time. Conceivably hundreds or thousands or millions or more solar years of time could have occurred in that gap.
I think if some pre-adamic cataclysm took place that rendered the earth and
possibly more or the solar system damaged under judgment, and God restored, recovered, and did some further creating in six days this statement would STILL be true.
"For in six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it." (Exodus 20:11)
I do not agree that a pre-Adamic destruction of some kind and a latter restoration from destruction makes
Exodus 20:11 not a true statement.