WithAllIAm said:
Hello Assyrian:
He did in Exodus 20:11
You specified the question was about God trying to make a six day creation clear
in Genesis, which is why I did not get into the Exodus quotes. However the thing with Exodus is God is not teaching about the creation here, it is about the Sabbath and the Hebrew working week, the creation is used as an illustration. Now when the creation is simply being used as an illustration it does not tell us whether the days are literal or not.
Look at the same command in Deuteronomy.
Deut 5:13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.
15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
Instead of the six day creation as an illustration, we have a description of their liberation from slavery, given in the form of a metaphor, an anthropomorphism.
Look again at the two passages in Exodus
Exodus 20:11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Exodus 31:17It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.
Just like the
mighty hand and an outstretched arm in Deuteronomy, God resting and being refreshed is another anthropomorphic metaphor describing God as though he were a weary labourer who is refreshed after a days rest. Exodus no more teaches a literal six day creation, than Deuteronomy teaches us that God has literal arms and hands and used them to free the Israelites.
and before that in Genesis 1:31; 2:1-3.
Gen 1:31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Gen 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
Gen 2:2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.
Gen 2:3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
Sorry, no comment about making the world in six days here. Your problem is even worse here when God's seventh day rest is interpreted non literally by both Jesus (John 5:17), and the writer of Hebrews (chapters 3&4).
We use the word day in several ways today yet you seem to have no problem understanding what is meant by each application of the term; for example:
In my father's day they would often travel through the day and rest at night on their way to Peth from Sydney which would take them several days.
Notice that the term "day" was used in three different ways, yet you can still make sense of it. It is not mysterious or poetical, nor can one conclude that what I wrote was symbolic...
Thanks.
In your illustration it is clear, yet the meaning of the days in Genesis has been raising questions for thousands of years. Unlike your father's contemporaries, there are no humans to give a scale to the days, only God. Nor for the first few days is there even a sun. If these are days whose meaning does not depend on the motion of the sun, then they don't really sound like normal literal days.
Of the other uses of the word day, only the very first
Gen 1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night is clear. How long was the day in Gen 2:17? 12 hours, 24 hours or a thousand years? Generally the early church interpreted it as a thousand years, because Adam a lot longer than 24 hours after eating the fruit. How long was the day in Gen 2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens. I have heard people argue for 24 hours, 3 days, 6 days or 6 eons.
The problem remains, if God wanted to make it clear that creation days were literal, it would have been clearer if he hadn't been so loose and poetic in his use of the word 'day' in those first chapters.