A THEORETICAL GAP & VERY LONG DAYS
Beware this is very technical!
Francis Schaeffer has written a book called No Final Conflict that basically says our comprehension of scientific and Biblical knowledge is less than perfect. As a result, once our understanding significantly improves, there will be no final conflict between Biblical truth and scientific truth.
God is the One who always is, and before our universe ever existed, God could say, “I am.” “In the beginning” God created, which means God was already there in the beginning. “In the beginning” is thus the beginning of our time and universe since God wrote the Bible for our sake and not as a personal diary. God has no beginning, so by implication, any beginning has to do exclusively with us. “In the beginning” is also an indefinite period of time according to the original Hebrew. In John’s gospel it uses the same phrase “In the beginning” but in the past tense to refer to God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (italics mine). Hence, God pre-existed our “In the beginning.”
“In the beginning” happened billions and billions of years ago as scientific evidence can clearly and irrefutably demonstrate, and this would coincide with a start that happened over an indefinite period. (And as an aside, the “Big Bang” essentially means that the whole universe went from zero to a million in less than a second. This drastic burst of an unfathomable amount of energy has no plausible scientific explanation. Scientists may know a little about how but can’t explain why. My point is that the why is Who: If God says, “Let there be light,” the “Big Bang” is exactly what I would expect to happen.)
Genesis 1:2 says, “The earth was formless and void.” There is only one other place in the Bible where this exact Hebrew phrase is used, in Jeremiah 4:23: “I looked on the earth, and behold; it was formless and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light” (italics mine). Jeremiah says these words in the context of a lament over the destruction of Judah because of the people’s sin. As a result, there was no light, and it was a time of judgment. God created in Genesis 1:1 and then in 1:2 the earth (not the heavens) was formless and void. Formless comes from tohu, meaning a desert, an empty place, a desolation. Void comes from bohu, meaning an undistinguishable ruin.
God is Someone who makes something that is good and valuable, so how could He create an uninhabited wilderness? He didn’t. Something happened that brought the earth under judgment, which means there’s a presupposed gap in between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The only event that we know happened prior to our beginning other than God is the fall of Lucifer and angels from heaven for their revolt against God.[615] Perhaps that or something else caused a period of judgment, but the point is that this all happened in that gap. When the gap was closed is when the figurative (and therefore very long) days of creation start in Genesis 1.
The Hebrew for day is yom, which can mean a literal sunrise to sunset day but can also denote a season or an unspecified period of time. For example, in Genesis 2:4, yom is used to refer to the entire six days of creation, and many other places use yom in a figurative sense.[616] And on the seventh day, God rested, but the text does not denote there was an evening and a morning the seventh day. Could we still be in the seventh day? Yes, especially if we consider that this explains why God isn’t creating any more, because Biblically, seven equates to completion and perfection. Hebrews 4:3-4 says that God is still resting from creation. Perhaps the start of the eighth (a number that means new beginnings) day will be Christ’s second coming.
Granted, in Exodus 20:11, the six days of creation are compared to six literal days of the week, but God also told Adam in Genesis 2:17 that in the day he ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would surely die. Well, Adam did not die in the literal day that he ate the fruit but when he was more than 900 years old.[617] Also consider that one day with God is like 1,000 years with man,[618] and the six days of creation happened according to God’s timetable.
It also contradicts logic that life could have survived without sunlight for an extended period of time from Genesis 1:11 to 1:14, but the first thing God commanded into existence was light—not the sun or sunlight, but “light”—which would be able to sustain life over a very long period of time from 1:11 to 1:14. Furthermore, it is clear from Revelation that God Himself is a source of light able to illuminate existence. Revelation 21:22-23 says: “I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.” Revelation 22:5 says: “And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.”
Additionally, consider that on the third day of creation (Genesis 1:12), the text says, “Then God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them’; and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.” It clearly takes longer than 24 hours for vegetation to produce seeds and then have those seeds yield more seed-bearing plants. And on the sixth day God made Adam, Adam named all the animals God brought to him, and He put Adam to sleep to make Eve. All of this is a lot to achieve in 24 hours.
If all the days are figurative, then “In the beginning” happened billions and billions of years ago and the creation narrative leaves room for all that we have discovered about an “old Earth” (e.g., dinosaurs and other forms of advanced life dating back tens of thousands of years) that existed well before humans arrived on the scene on the sixth day.
For those who subscribe to an “old Earth” philosophy, it is important to consider if plants and animals died before the fall (pre-sin). God may have created animals prior to the fall that were subject to death when they were created. When God created plants (Genesis 1:11-12), they were made already producing seeds after their own kind. Because mortality necessitates reproduction, the implication is that plant life was made already being subject to death. The warning that Adam received in Genesis 2:17 is that only he would die if he ate the forbidden fruit, not that animals would die. Furthermore, in Romans 5:12, Paul makes it very clear that “death spread to all men, because all sinned” (emphasis added). In other words, death spread to human beings, and not other parts of creation. My expectation is that death can only spread where death does not exist, and because humans are the only part of creation made in God’s image, we were originally made without the possibility of death, but sin changed that.