John Lennox: What Does "Day" Mean in the Genesis Creation Story?

throughout the ages many have held that there can be straight lines drawn from the creation week of Genesis to the week of ordinary life and indeed this is the Jewish year 5773 dated according to the Jewish calendar from creation the reformers Luther and Calvin who believed in a fixed Earth also held the 24hour view but there were others in the ancient world long before Darwin or anybody else like that had ever been heard of who suggested that as Justin mar martyr put it that the days might have been long ages he noticed that one of

the Psalms said A Thousand Years in your sight are ours but yesterday when it is passed and in the second century Clement of Alexandria thought that creation could not take place in time at all since I quote time was born along with things which exist and Augustine who wrote a great de about Genesis openly stated in his book The City of God that he found the days of Genesis difficult in fact he held that God had created everything in a moment and that the days represented a sequence used simply to explain it to us now

these men were not armchair theorists and they existed long before the days of modern science many of them gave their lives of course for their Christian faith so let's come to these Genesis days the interpretations are many I've counted 15 or 16 I think but they morph into three or four mainstreams number one the 24hour view the days are 24hour days of one Earth week less than 10,000 years ago two the day age view the days represent successive periods of time of unspecified length three the framework view the days are not in chronological order but

they're in logical order the first three days representing form and the second three representing fullness the sky filled with birds the sea filled with fish and the Earth filled with animals and human beings and then there is the view that they are days of Revelation the time during which God revealed it to man now that's a lot to take in at one blush but I suspect most of you are familiar with this but one thing I want to illustrate is the difference between logical and chronological order if you compare Genesis 1 with Isaiah 45:12 you'll

see what I mean here's Isaiah I made the Earth and created man on it it was my hands that stretched out the heavens and I commanded all their hosts if you take that as a chronological statement it means the Earth was made before the heavens but is it meant to be taken chronologically or is it meant to be taken logically when we are describing things we often mix those two orders depending on our point of view so there are these various views the framework view is one that is very much to the for these days

particularly the version of it given by John Walton called The Cosmic Temple View that is I repeat the idea that the first three and the second three days are in parallel I would just make a simple observation that the fact that they are in parallel is fairly obvious but the second thing is it doesn't mean that there's no chronology you can't put birds in a sky that's not already there to put it crudely so even the framework view has implications of an implied chronology now what should we think of all these different interpretations well they

make me very careful and I do not claim ladies and gentlemen to of a definitive solution of this but what I want to share with you a number of things that have helped me think about it the first thing we note is that there are different interpretations of the same text now that is interesting because it means that people have a certain difficulty in understanding what this text means and I suspect a lot of it comes from in my experience that not enough time has been taken to see what the text actually says as distinct

from what it means now those two flow into each other but what I'm going to try to do tonight is very briefly look at this again and take you through it and see what it says if you look at the first chapter of Genesis you first of all have a statement regarding in the creation of the heavens and the Earth in the first two verses then we have six days of God's creation and organizational activity culminating in the creation of human beings in God's image and then we have the seventh day of God's rest so

it's a very simple an introduction a middle the six days and as Aristotle would say an ending so that the initial immediate impression is a chronological sequence of events the briefest if you like of brief histories of time it starts with an earth that is without form and void there's nothing much there it ends with the Earth full of all kinds of life and culminating the process is the highest form of life human beings made in the image of God let me just stop there the very fact of a sequence is FAS fascinating because it

seems to be saying whatever you believe about the days that God did not create everything at once there is a sequence with a goal and what is the goal it's human beings made in the image of God ladies and gentlemen our world desperately needs to hear this today human beings are the only creature or thing in the entire physical universe that are said to be made in the image of God the heavens declare the glory of God it is nowh said they were made in His image you were made in God's image and that distinguishes

you above every other creature you don't need me to remind you that in America and in the United Kingdom today there is enormous pressure to devalue human beings to just another species and before we get into the details here just let's see what this text is actually saying it's saying that you as a human being are uniquely valued because you are made in the image of God that is an immensely powerful and important message so there's a sequence of days and a rest which becomes of course the model of our Earth week and in any

age readers of Genesis one would be familiar with this basic cycle of Life the human working week and they would know the law of Exodus remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy six days you shall labor do your work and so on and the readers would clearly understand that Genesis 1 portrays God as a creative Craftsman going about his week of work taking rest each night from evening to morning and then having a day of rest in the end but of course the thought will read would realize a lot more would realize that God's

work of creation was vastly different from their work we do not do the things that God does indeed the Hebrew word for create is only used in the Bible with God as subject the readers would also realize that their rest was not the same as God rests God never Slumbers or sleep and they would realize that God's creation week was never repeated whereas theirs was so there were points of contact between the Genesis week and the repeated Earth week but there were major points of difference but now comes the key question what is Genesis actually

say well first of all the word day which is the crucial issue here well the first mention of it in chapter one is verse five where we read God called the light day and the Darkness he called night so what's the length of that day not 2 24 Hours by definition it isn't I find it spectacularly amazing ladies and gentlemen that people can read this text and insist that in every place where the word day in Genesis or the Bible occurs it means a 24-hour day the very first use doesn't it contrasts day with night

and that reminds us of the multivalency of the word day in most languages I came on ches day in the day is not saying the same thing twice it's saying I came in the daytime so the very first use of the word is the contrast between the 12 hours at the quater at least of day and night so number one is not a 24-hour day it's actually less so that's the first thing secondly the second occurrence is in the same verse day one involves evening and morning and would be naturally understood by him Hebrews as

what we would think of as a 24-hour day so now we have two meanings for the word day but there are more we come to the seventh day the Sabbath there's no mention of evening and morning and for centuries people have asked why and Augustine and many others made the sensible suggestion that God rested on the seventh day but it didn't start creating again that that Sabbath rest best has remained until today and is still going on and hence the word evening and morning is not appended to it so there's at least one very long

day that I find millions of Christians believe in anyway without necessarily being aware of it so the seventh day arguably at least is different from the first six which is different from the first mention of the word day God of course rested from his work of creation not from his work of redemption that is a different matter and is very important but ladies and gentlemen the implication of God resting from his work of creation that is immensely important because it means that things were going on during creation that aren't going on anymore so that the

present is not a total key to the past now of course that is dynamite in certain academic circles but I'm simply trying to see what scripture is saying it's saying that God did certain things and he stopped doing them there was a rest but then finally in Genesis 2:4 we meet the expression when God created but the word when there is the Hebrew word for day and you see here is now another use of the word day that we've all got you know in my young day at Cambridge CS Lewis was a professor you would

never think of asking me was that Tuesday or Wednesday because day there is an expression excuse me for an indefinite period of time isn't it it's used in Hebrew in that way it's used in most languages in that way so now looking at this fascinating text we have several distinct meanings they're all primary meaning and they're all different now this text has roughly 100 Words and here's a word used in five different senses which warns me that this is extremely sophisticated writing it may be very simple on the surface but there's a sophistication to it

that begins to emerge very rapidly so how should we interpret all that well the next point to make I think is this verses 1 and two of Genesis in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and so on those two at the beginning are separated from the period of days I find many people haven't noticed that because every day from two on begins with and God said so you would logically expect that day one begins with and God said but that means that it's verse three and not verse one in other words the

creation of the heavens and the Earth however you interpret the days according to the text did not occur in day one now that is very interesting isn't it because if that is the case and the Hebrew experts whom I have consulted tell me that the Hebrew changes the tense to make that extremely clear that verses one or two are written in such a way as to indicate this occurs before the main narrative well ladies and gentlemen one of the major issues I hear around the place is how old is the Earth or the universe I'm

not so sure that scripture even discusses it because whatever you think of the days whether you think that there are days of one week or long days if they were not at the beginning then the beginning occurred at an indefinite time in the past now if scripture doesn't tell me when the beginning was then why should I be dogmatic about it because it's not the issue all right now of course a lot of things get conflated here because we Loosely talk about the age of the Earth but there are several ages to be thought about

aren't there there's the age of the universe there's the age of the Earth and there's the age of life and there's the age of humanity they're not all the same even if you believe in a literal six day week 10,000 years ago they're not all the same and it's important to differentiate them I'm simply making Point number one that as far as I can see the text of the Bible does not discuss the actual age of planet Earth at all it simply tells us in the beginning whenever that was God did it what it now

concentrates on is a sequence of days well you say no let's get down to it you just told us evening and morning day one day two that's a 24-hour day that's exactly what I said ladies and gentlemen but now let's think again because there's another little thing if you look at the Bible you usually say the first day the second the third the fourth that's not what the Hebrew says Hebrew has a word for the Hy the day it's not used for Days 1 to 5 it's only used for days six and 7even that's intriguing

because you see if you were thinking of a normal Earth week you would either either have them all without the article or them all with the article you certainly wouldn't go not the first day but day one day two day three day four day five the sixth day the seventh day now what does that mean that's very interesting isn't it because you see if we just think back suppose you only at this page of scripture forget science forget everything else just use Logic on it and try to understand it it's saying there is a sequence

of days we can presume they're 24-hour days evenings and mornings 1 2 3 4 5 six they're in sequence and they days in which and God said but nothing in the text demands that their days of a single Earth week they're the creation days on which God spoke so here's a possibility I Wouldn't Die for this you know Al some of you might want me to die for it before I go tonight but I'm only making a suggestion that opens up a vast possibility that what these days are is what they claim to be God

spoke it didn't take him long to speak if I might put it that way and God said and something happens it might have taken a very long time for the potential of all of that to develop and then sometime later God speaks and then sometime later he speaks again which means of course that if there are any traces of this to be found we would expect to find what we do find the sudden appearance of new levels of complexity