Believing the Bible

I want to take a moment to step aside from the usual pointless blog posts and silly discussions and talk about something I think is pretty important. I was listening to a Ken Ham seminar from 1992ish that was at Cedarville (if you want to hear it let me know) the other day and he was mostly talking about the word yom in the book of Genesis which as most of you probably know can be interpreted either as "day" or "age" (usually meaning thousands of years) depending on who you ask.

Well Ken Ham holds to a literal, simplest interpretation of these verses saying that it most definitely means "day" and not "age". I have always believed this myself but have had trouble explaining why I thought it was dangerous to believe in the age theory. Ken Ham, however, is very good at explaining why so I'm basically just going to say what he says...

First of all, this age interpretation didn't even start showing up until evolution started to develop as an explanation to our existence. This is because the scientific idea of an old earth was being pushed on church leaders which led them to find a way to make the Bible fit science. Hopefully we can all immediately see the problem with that! Don't think this is the first time this has happened, not too long ago, a group of Southern Baptist churches threw out several books of the Bible that talked about David because they couldn't find archaeological evidence of his existence. The evidence of his existence was later found and the books re-accepted, but we see what happens when we put our knowledge before the Bible.

Another thought is that when you put aside all the biases on the subject of the Genesis 1 definition of day, we can pretty well see that the truth is hard to dispute. Of course if you ask someone who already has an invested interest in believing one or the other, it's hard to take their answer as an unbiased interpretation. But when Ken asked several scholars who didn't believe the Bible was true at all (meaning they just want to interpret it as it is written with no agenda) they always said it means day...as in 24 hours. This is because every time the Hebrew word yom is used in the Old Testament as it is in Genesis, it always means day, as in day, as in 24 hours. The list of reasons goes on and on.

The reason this is such a big issue for me is because this sort of thing happens is because we're putting what we know above what God has clearly told us in the Bible. The way day used in Genesis is really no different than the word we use today. Think about the sentence, "During the day I drove for a day in my car from back in the day." The context tells us what each one means as does yom in Genesis.

When reading the Bible, we can never assume we know more than God. We must also assume that God wanted us to know the meaning of what He's saying to us so he's not going to make it hard to understand in general. When God blatantly says that he created the world in 6 days, I'm just going to have to assume he knows what he's talking about regardless of what the world tells me. If you're honestly going to say that day means thousands of years, you're going to have to say that God messed up with the Bible, because that's most definitely not what Genesis says...that's not what God says.

If you need more check Ken Ham's website or maybe just this podcast. Please send me information on any opposing views to this interpretation of the Bible because I would really love to hear it.