The biblical age of the Earth, the idea of the Earth being billions of years old, is a relatively new idea.
This idea has only become popular within the last 200 years or so.
Prior to the early 1800s and late 1700s, most people believed the biblical age of the Earth, or about 6000 years old, as recorded in the Bible.
They took God's word as truth. Then the scientists gave the idea of millions of years to the theologians.
Knowing that millions of years are not in the Bible, they had to find some way to add it to the Bible.
They began to take man's word as truth instead of taking God's word as truth.
They began adding to the Bible with ideas such as the Gap Theory, the Day Age Theory, and theistic evolution.
In 1795, a book was published titled Theory of the Earth by James Hutton.
This book made people doubt that the Earth was 6000 years old.
Thomas Chalmers invented the Gap Theory in 1814 and Christians began to accept this millions of years idea.
Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859 and there was not much resistance to his evolution theory because the Christians had already accepted an old age of the Earth.
It is an important topic. Either God's word is truth or man's word is truth.
Today's modern idea of uniformitarianism says that the present is the key to the past.
This is absolutely wrong. The Bible is the only perfect key to the past.
If you take the Bible for what it is and add nothing to it, you will get only thousands of years for the history of the Earth and death after sin.
Adam's sin is what brought death into the world.
If you take the Bible and add man's fallible dating methods, you will get millions of years and death before Adam's sin.
This is heresy. You cannot have death before sin.
Many people now believe that maybe the word day in Genesis isn't a literal 24 hour day.
Why are they only questioning the use of the word day in Genesis?
Why not question its use anywhere else in the Bible?
They often quote 2 Peter 3.8, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years.
But they don't even bother to read the rest of the verse.
That one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.
This is a simile that is simply saying that time doesn't mean anything to God.
God is not locked into time, space, and matter like we are.
Again, why are they only questioning the use of the word day in Genesis?
I mean, how long did Joshua march around the walls of Jericho?
When you read the book of Genesis, the Lord tells us specifically what happened on the first six days of history.
There is no need to try to fit millions of years between the days of Genesis.
Some try to say that the days in Genesis are actually long periods of time.
Here's the Farrar Fenton Bible of 1903.
He says, by periods God created that which produced the solar systems, then that which produced the earth.
This was the close and the dawn of the first age.
This was the close and dawn of the second age.
He was trying extremely hard to fit millions of years into the Bible.
Adding to God's word is not a very smart thing to do.
Think about it. God made plants on day three.
He made the sun on day four.
The plants need the sunlight to survive.
Imagine those plants waiting for millions of years for the sun to come up.
God made the birds and insects on day five and they pollinate the plants.
No, the days in Genesis are not long periods of time.
The word for day is yom in Hebrew.
It is used over 1,500 times in the King James Bible.
Let's take a look at this word and see how it is defined outside of Genesis 1.
And then we will come back to Genesis 1 and see how it is defined there.
When day is used with a number, it always means an ordinary day.
When evening and morning are together without day, it always means an ordinary day.
When evening and morning are used with day, it always means an ordinary day.
When night and day are together, it always means an ordinary day.
So now let's go back and look at Genesis 1 and see if we can figure out what the word of God is trying to tell us.
Now bear with me. This is going to be a little rough.
Here we have night, evening, morning, number, day.
Evening, morning, number, day.
It's almost as if God knew that this would be an issue in the future.
And he made it as clear as he possibly could.
It could not be any more clearer than this.
A day is one rotation of the earth on its axis.
A month is about one orbit of the moon around the earth.
And a year is about one orbit of the earth around the sun.
So where do we get our idea for a week?
The only place this is found is in the Bible.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.
Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Exodus 20, 11.
How old is the earth?
Now that we've made it clear exactly what a day is, let's look and see what the Bible says about the age of the earth.
First we need to look at a few verses.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
For by him Jesus were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth.
And he answered and said unto them, Had ye not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female?
Talking about Adam and Eve.
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.
And so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.
For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.
And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
So the creation of Adam and Eve was the beginning.
There was no death until Adam sinned and Eve was the mother of all living.
This makes it pretty easy, we just have to add up the dates.
Adam was 130 when Seth was born.
Seth was 105 when Enos was born.
Enos was 90 when Canaan was born.
If you go through the bible and add up the dates, it's not that hard to do.
You will get a date of about 4000 B.C. for the creation.
So according to the bible the earth is about 6000 years old.
The textbooks say that the earth is billions of years old.
Jesus said the creation of Adam was the beginning.
Was Jesus lying?
Did he not understand modern science?
Or was he right?
Could the date of 4004 B.C. in the Scofield reference bible be correct?
In the next video we will show many scientific evidences that show us that the earth is young, not old.