The age of the earth?

Many Christians will argue that the earth is only 6000 some years old. I tend not to belive that. I have been studying the work of Witness Lee, a Chinese American who devoted his life to studying the bible. In his writing he puts a lot of emphsis on the adjectives and verbs used in the original Latin text. He gives an interesting explanation of the first few verses in Genesis. (He actually wrote over 1500 pages just on Genesis)


..."The first two chapters appear to be
a record of creation, but this is superficial. The underlying
thought is focused on life. These two chapters are a record
of life. They are too simple and too brief to be an adequate
account of creation. Genesis 1 and 2 were not intended by
God to be a record of creation, but a revelation of life.
Look into these chapters. First, it mentions that God
created the universe, and that the universe was ruined,
becoming waste, empty, and full of darkness. Then, the Spirit
of God came in to brood in order to produce life. Following
the Spirit of life came the light, also for producing life. After
this, the air was made to divide the waters of death. Then
the land emerged out of the death waters. The land appeared
for the purpose of generating life, and immediately every kind
of plant life was produced. Then came the animal life in the
water, the animal life in the air, and the animal life on the
earth, and, eventually, the human life. Following the human
life is the divine life, indicated by the tree of life. Thus, we
can see that these two chapters, strictly speaking, are not a
record of creation, but of life."

"In Genesis 1 and 2, three different verbs are used
concerning Gods creation and re-creation: created, made, and
formed. To create means to bring something into existence
out of nothing. Only God can create. We cannot create. We
can only make. To make means to take something which
exists already and then use it to produce something else. On
the first day, God did not create the light nor on the third
day did He create the earth, because the light was there
already and the earth was buried under the deep waters. On
the first day God did not create but He commanded. God
said, Let there be light, and light was there. On the third
day, God commanded the buried land to come out of the death
waters. That was not an act of creating, but of making. Then,
God made man a physical body. That was formation. God
formed man with the dust.
Gods creation is in verse 1 and Gods re-creation begins
with verse 3. It doesnt say that God made the heavens, nor
that God formed the earth. It says that God created the
heavens and the earth."


What I get out of his writing is that the earth didn't have its first day until we had God's presence, because the day is being in Gods presence. Therefore the earth can be as old as the archeologists claim.

 

Tom,

Interesting stuff. There are several things of that sort that are not clear to us here. Its both fun and interesting to guess how old the Earth is. When we finally arrive in the Lords presence we will all learn how wrong we were about most of it. Fortunatley for us the Bible makes the most important thing clear. That being the acceptance of Christ for our eternal salvation! Have an excellent Easter!

 

This had been a point that had bugged me for some time. About three years ago, a coworker leant me a book by Gerald Schroeder. He is a PhD physicist who taught at MIT for 15 or so years and then went to Jeruselum to study Hebrew and the Old Testament as it was written. After all of his study, he concluded (maybe not the right word) that 15 billion years or 6 days, it depended on what your frame of reference was. A relativistic physics thing.

I am out of time now, but here is a link to his web site.

http://www.geraldschroeder.com/sog.html

Dale