A Short Post About the Days of Creation in Genesis.

We are a church who believes that Moses was God's prophet, and that God created the universe from nothing. We don't follow Darwin because we aren't atheists, agnostics, or pantheists. Jesus Christ was the Son of God. He proved it supremely by rising from the dead. He believed in Moses' writings, so we do too.

Specifically and especially, the first 11 chapters of Genesis are history, not poetry or allegory. All our members are required to subscribe to this. For instance, a recent applicant for membership affirmed her belief that Adam and Eve were real, historical people, and that they were special creations of God.

Our national church association requires belief in the historicity of Adam and Eve; and that God created them as special creations. God didn't develop them from out of previous-existing animals. Jesus also believed this, so we follow Him.

Since we reject the philosophical presupposition of materialism (meaning, a belief that nothing but matter exists), we reject all the pagan conclusions which spring out of that poisonous root. 

Jesus' genealogy in Luke chapter 3 goes all the way back to Adam. That means Adam was just as much a human being as Jesus of Nazareth was. This is consistent with Genesis 1, where God created the living things fully-formed.

God didn't create millions of nests filled with little eggs, He filled the sky with adult birds. God didn't create fields full of germinating seeds. He created all vegetation fully formed. God didn't create saplings. He created fully-grown trees with multiple rings, and burrowing bugs already in them. He didn't create earth's geology with un-decayed potassium. He created rocks with varying degrees of molecular decay. He didn't only create stars millions of light-years away. He created the stars' light, already in transit and already penetrating earth's atmosphere.

God created everything this way, because nature is a massive, interlocking, symbiotic system. Everything in nature depends on everything else, in various ways and degrees, so God created everything already grown, already reproducing, already shining, and fully operational. This is what Moses described in Genesis 1.

At the same time, our national church association chose not to draw a line on how chronologically long the days of creation were. My guess is this was because a word-study shows that the word "day" is used in a few different senses in the Old Testament, including Genesis 1.

Moses spoke of non-celestial light, thus disengaged from any shining star or earth orbit, and named it "day" in Genesis 1:5. He called the entirety of the creation process "day", in Genesis 2:4. He also used the word "day" to mean "moment" or "time", in Gen. 2:17. 

I myself believe that the creation days were the same length as a Jewish Sabbath day (sundown to sundown), based on Exodus 20:8-11. But I acknowledge the variety of ways Moses used the word yom in Genesis 1-2. Nevertheless, our denomination, and all our members, explicitly affirm the historicity and special creation of Adam and Eve. Without a historical Adam, Christianity falls apart.