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| PentecostalTheology.comYom is the Hebrew word for day. It usually means a 24 hour day but on rare occasions it can be a figure of speech for a longer period of time as, “The day of the Lord is coming,” signifying a time of judgment.
In Psalm 90:4 Moses compared a thousand years to yesterday or like a watch in the night. No doubt Peter had this verse in mind when he wrote, “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.” 2Peter 3:8
How long was a creative day? Can we know for sure? I am confident we can. In the Ten Commandments, God commanded the Israelites to keep the Sabbath. In Exodus 20:9 God describes the ordinary work week, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work.” Then in verse eleven, God, in the same commandment, with the same finger wrote in the same slab of stone that he created everything in the universe in six days. “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, but on the seventh day He rested.: Exodus 20:11. To be consistent, we must interpret the six days of creation in Exodus 20:11 in the same way as the six literal 24-hour week days of Exodus 20:9.
Genesis 1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. Here the divine record is clear and concise. One cycle of light and darkness, one evening and one morning was the first creative day. To be consistent we must interpret the remaining creative days also as evening and morning, 24-hour long days.
Some teach that the creative days must have been longer, much longer. Not 1,000 years each, misaplying Peter’s words of God’s prophetic patience to the creation narrative, but millions, even billions of years. Not to fit the plain words of scripture but to accommodate a naturalistic worldview based upon Darwin’s God denying theory of evolution.
I think both the Bible and science are on our side. The big bang is a theory that requires a miracle without a miracle worker. Light, energy, space, and matter, even life itself all blasted into existence from absolutely nothing with no Creator and for no purpose. Is it scientific? It defies every known law of science. It takes more faith to believe nothing created everything for no reason than it does to believe the words of scripture, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”