2 Views of the Creation Account

Creation Basics

For the past 200 years, Christian scholars have reinterpreted the Genesis creation account in various ways. Gap theory, day-age theory, framework hypothesis, progressive creation, theistic evolution—each one declared to have a unique and legitimately biblical interpretation. However, under scrutiny, there are only two overarching viewpoints among the range of interpretations.

1. The Biblical Creation Account

Genesis 1 declares that God created the heavens and earth in six literal, 24-hour days. In the beginning, he called everything “very good.” There was no death, disease, or suffering until Adam disobeyed God and sin entered the world.

Taken as a literal, historical narrative, the Genesis flood (which occurred some 1,650 years after creation) explains the origin of the vast majority of the fossil record. This explanation is theologically consistent because all the death and suffering recorded in the fossil record took place after sin and death entered the world through Adam’s rebellion, as Romans 5:12 indicates.

2. All Other Interpretations

Regardless of specific differences among various reinterpretations of Genesis 1–11, all these views accept the secular world’s old-earth interpretations of the geologic record. Their shared commonality is the addition of millions of years somewhere within them. Logically, any attempt to insert millions of years into Scripture must be done somewhere within (or before) the six days of creation, regardless of what a person believes those days represent.

However, that would mean that not only the rock layers but also what we find within the rock layers—a record of death, suffering, and disease—were laid down before the end of the sixth day of creation when God declared that everything he had made was “very good” (Genesis 1:31).

If any of these various interpretations are true, then God must have used death and suffering to create and called it all “very good” before Adam sinned. Here we see the ultimate difference between the traditional biblical creation account and the other interpretations. They all attack the very gospel itself because they all require the effects of sin to have been present in creation prior to the very reason for sin being present in the world. “If death existed before sin, then death isn’t the payment for sin. If death isn’t the payment for sin, then Jesus’ death does not pay our sin debt.”1 And that would mean Jesus’ sacrifice is spiritually impotent—a very big difference indeed.