Reality Check
By James Scott Bell

What Does the Bible Teach About Creation?

As we all know, a debate (more of a shouting match) exists over the matter of evolution vs. creation. One of the key points of the debate is the age of the Earth.

So called Young Earth Creationists (YECs) contend the Earth is only 6 - 10 thousand years old. Of course, most scientists scoff at this, holding abundant evidence that the earth is billions of years old.

Then there are creationists who believe in an Old Earth (OECs) and that the acts of creation recorded in Genesis could be of indeterminate length.

The weakness in the YEC view is that it seems to fly in the face of the scientific data. YECs are therefore constantly at war with every single datum that natural science produces.

OECs are happy that their view lines up with what science teaches about the age of the Earth. But they must then take Genesis 1 & 2 and come up with some rather creative ways to get around what is apparently taught. Some "mythologize" these chapters, others "allegorize" them or see Genesis 1 as mere poetry. OECs with a high view of Scripture say that the word "day" in the Hebrew can mean a period of any length, thus could also be millions of years. This seems, however, to fly in the face of the specific "evening and morning" formulation.

So both YECs and OECs have problems, and haven't been able to come to any sort of agreement.

So what's the answer?

I believe that sound biblical interpretation compels a view that has none of the weaknesses of the other two views. This position is the Interval View (sometimes tagged as the "Gap Theory").

Now, if you were a conservative, Bible believing Christian 100 years ago, or went to a Bible school, odds are you would have been taught the Interval View. That's because it was the view of the most popular conservative Bible, the Scofield Reference Bible. Not only that, but most of the respected conservative Bible teachers held this view. Men like R. A. Torrey, J. Vernon McGee and Donald Grey Barnhouse, to name but three.

So what happened? Why did the Interval View (IV) stop getting taught?

To be blunt, it was the rise of the Creation Science movement. From the 1960's on, this movement saw itself as the great opponent of modern science. As a consequence, they believed any concession that the Earth may be old was unacceptable. Even if it came from their spiritual brethren, those who held the IV view.

With the new energy poured into the YEC position, it became dominant. But that does not necessarily make it correct.

What, then, is the Interval View? I will leave it to one of the greatest Bible teachers who ever lived, R. A. Torrey, to explain. Torrey was an associate of D. L. Moody and helped establish the Moody Bible Institute. He later became a world famous evangelist, and Dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA). He was a world class scholar, and an expert in both Hebrew and Greek.

He was also the general editor of The Fundamentals, the series of articles upholding biblical Christianity.

This is a man whose intellect and evangelical credentials are unquestioned. Here is what he said about Genesis 1:

»There is no need of going in detail into this order of creation as taught by modern science and Genesis 1. For there is grave reason to doubt if anything in Genesis 1 after verse 1 relates to the original creation of the universe. All the verses after the first seem rather to refer to a refitting of the world that had been created and had afterward been plunged into chaos by the sin of some pre-Adamic race, to be the abode of the present race that inhabits it, the Adamic race.

The reasons for so thinking are, first, that the words translated "without form and void" ("waste and void," RV) are used everywhere else in the Bible of the state of affairs that God brought upon persons and places as a punishment for sin. For example, in Isaiah 34:11 we read of the judgment that God shall bring upon Idumea as a punishment for their sins in these words: "He shall stretch over it a line of confusion, and the plummet of emptiness" (RV). The Hebrew words translated "confusion" and "emptiness" are the same that are translated "without form and void" in Genesis 1:2. We read again in Jeremiah 4:23-27: "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void." In both instances the words "waste and void" refer to a ruin which God had sent as a punishment for sin, and the assumption is very strong that they have a similar significance in Genesis 1.

The second reason for this interpretation is stronger yet, namely, that the Bible expressly declares that God did not create the earth "in vain" (Isaiah 45:18). But the word translated "in vain" in this passage is precisely the one translated "without form" in Genesis 1:2. In the Revised Version of Genesis 1:2 and Isaiah 45:18 the word is translated in both instances "waste." Here then is a plain and specific declaration in the Bible that God did not create the earth "without form" (or rather "waste," RV), so it is clear that Genesis 1:2 cannot refer to the original creation. The word translated "was" in Genesis 1:2 can with perfect propriety be translated "became." Then Genesis 1:2 would read: "And the earth became waste and void." In that case in Genesis 1:1 we have the actual account of creation. It is very brief but wonderfully expressive, instructive and suggestive. In Genesis 1:2 we have a brief but suggestive account of how the earth became involved in desolation and emptiness, presumably through the sin of some pre-Adamic race. Then all after verse 2 does not describe the original creation of the earth, but its fitting up anew for the new race God is to bring upon the earth-the Adamic race. Even if we allow the word "was" to stand in Genesis 1:2, and do not substitute the word "became," it does not materially affect the interpretation.

If this is the true interpretation of the chapter (and the argument for this interpretation seems conclusive), then of course this record cannot by any possibility come into conflict with any discoveries of geology as yet made or to be made, for the geological strata lie back of the period here described. The agreement of the order as set forth in Genesis 1 with the order as discovered by science would be accounted for by the fact that God always works in orderly progress from the lower to the higher.«

In the next article, I will go through these points very carefully. I will show IV to be the strongest, most biblically sound interpretation of Genesis. I will also deal with the common arguments used against IV, and show those arguments to be unpersuasive.

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