By Ada Brownell
An excerpt from Ada Brownell's book, Imagine the Future You
Also available in Audio. Read
or listen to first chapter free! #Teens #Family #Devotions
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What do you believe?
Did it take millions of years for our All Powerful God to create the earth and everything else in the universe?
Here are four different ideas about the days of creation from Bible scholars.
Twenty-four Days of Re-creation:
The belief there was a creation before Adam that was somehow destroyed. (This
idea leaves a gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.)
Age-Long Days of
Creation: The belief that creation occurred over six different ages
that could have been thousands of years in length.
Revelatory Days of Creation: The
idea that the days had nothing to do with creation but with the amount of time
God took giving Moses, the writer of the Book of Genesis, information about
creation.
Twenty-four-hour
days of creation: The belief
that God literally created the Earth and all that is in it in six
twenty-four-hour days, as we know days.
So when Genesis says, “So the evening and the morning were
the first day,” “The evening and the morning were the second day,” and so forth
until God rested on the seventh day, the length of time can be interpreted
several ways.
One thing that makes me believe in a young Earth is
population. Scientists use the “population J curve” to show exponential growth
of the number of humans. The “J curve” is any system that grows by doubling—one,
two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etc., or geometric growth.
Experts estimate the world’s population was two hundred
million in 1 AD and population continued to double and double until 1850—the
curve of the J— when eight hundred million people lived on the Earth. Estimates
and censuses showed two billion by 1930, three billion in 1960, four billion in
1976, five billion in 1990, six billion in 2002, and an estimated seven billion
in 2011.
It took nearly two thousand years to quadruple the number of
people from the time Jesus walked the earth but only eighty years for the
population to grow from one to two billion between 1850 and 1930 and twelve
years to grow a billion between 1990 and 2002. The US Census Bureau estimated
the world population to be 7.073 billion in 2012.
This increase is
despite diebacks because of disease and epidemics, natural catastrophes, and
wars. In my mind, there is no way man could have been here millions of years.
Again, science uses millions of years to make evolution seem plausible because
we can’t see any evidence for it in a lifetime of one hundred years.
But the length of
time that it took to create the Earth is not exceedingly important. What is
important is that we know and believe Genesis 1:1, that “in the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth.”
The whole world’s scientific thought constantly changes and
often contradicts what scientists thought was solid evidence. On the other
hand, the Creator and his witness never change and will never be outdated.
Imagine the Future You goes into detail about evidence for belief in God, and also evidence and even fraud such as the Piltdown Man designed to prove evolution.
As a Bible student, youth Christian education teacher and newspaper reporter, I've interviewed experts on both sides of the argument. Imagine the Future You, has details about some of those interviews.
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