Six-day creation: 1000 years and a day

One of the most used pseudo-loopholes to a six-day creation are the verses that indicate that with the Lord, "a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day." Here are the two verses (NKJV...the entire chapter is found in the verse links...or you can look 'em up):

• For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night (Psalm 90:4)
• But, 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 (2 Peter 3:8)

These verses echo the truth that God is outside the realm of time that He created. He is not bound by time. He is not constricted by time. God has no past, no present, and no future. That is what makes His covenant name YHWH, "I am," so profound. If you really want to cramp your brain, Augustine's "Confessions," Book Eleven (The Father) should provide you quite the spiritual and mental triathlon.

But the context and emphasis of these two verses are not meant to warp time. The psalm points to the issue that time is no big thing for God, but it is a huge constraint for man. Ultimately, the time of man's repentance, as described within the psalm, is very limited.

Peter's letter likewise deals with repentance, but the emphasis therein is God's patience toward His creatures.

So, is God outside of time? You bet. Time is a dimension in which He created man to exist.

Now here's toe-stub: those verses have no tie whatsoever to Genesis. Since neither passage deals with the creation and how God created the cosmos, the Christian cannot willy-nilly tie it back to the creation. Because God is not bound within the dimension He created does not mean that we can arbitrarily loose the constraints that He said He operated within in Genesis chapter one.

Simply put: that's horrid Bible scholarship. Actually, it's terrible scholarship within any discipline.

Still, that doesn't mean that "day" in Genesis one could not mean an eon. I'll hit that one next time.

(images property of NASA.gov)