You are exactly on the right track Emmy Lou to challenge people to believe the Bible not speculations such as the flood only covered the local middle eastern area when it clearly describes the whole earth, globally was flooded and all humankind was killed except those 8 in the ark, not people just in the middle east.
Keep believing what God says is the truth in Scripture & reading it in its CONTEXT to understand it & the testimony of the WHOLE of Scripture, not just the verse isolated but all the supportive verses THROUGHOUT Scripture that precisely confirm the truth of what God has spoken & had written down in the Holy Bible.
The bible does NOT say that at all. That is pure humanistic speculation or that a day described in the bible with an evening and a morning one day meaning ONLY a 24 hour time frame--NOT a span of indefinite time or a 'stage' of time. The Bible accurately describes a 24 hour day in Genesis 1 and THOUSANDS OF TIMES throughout the Bible when those qualifiers are given.
Exodus 20:8-11 Remember the Sabbath DAY, to keep it holy. SIX DAYS you shall labor & do all your work, but the 7th day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On IT you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.
11For in SIX DAYS the LORD made heaven & earth, the sea & all that is in them & rested on the 7TH DAY. THEREFORE the Lord blessed the Sabbath day & made it holy.
This legal, lawful definition in Scripture precisely AGAIN defines what those specific days were: actual literal 24 hour spans of time, a normally understood meaning throughout the Bible on what a normally understood day is.
Here again we have qualifiers to precisely describe what is meant by a day here. God had a legal definition. People were to work SIX DAYS and then rest on the 7th day. Do people work thousands of days or millions of years for each day they NORMALLY WORK in life? That is ridiculous & laughable.
A work day, whether what shift one works, like today, is considered one day. The started in the morning & quit in the evening. Sounds like Genesis 1?
Let me make it more precise. The 6 days of the week that they were working is then USED TO DEFINE THE 6 DAYS GOD CREATED THE HEAVEN(S) & THE EARTH. They are one & the same meaning! One cannot speculate or somehow say they are different. Scripture won't allow this presumption.
Again the 7th Sabbath day that the Israelites kept, a 24 hour period, from evening to morning, is AGAIN shown to be the same time frame when God rested on the 7th day in Genesis 2:1-3!
Exodus 31:17 It is a permanent sign of My covenant with the people of Israel. For in SIX DAYS the LORD made heaven & earth, but on the 7TH DAY he RESTED & was refreshed.’”
God confirms what He said, which is the truth & nothing but the truth, by many verses throughout Scripture as to show what He precisely meant by what was written.
Now some will try, for example, to support their wild speculations by mentioning the meaning of 'day' used in Gen 2:4, does NOT have the qualifiers of a period of light, morning & a period of darkness, evening & describing it plainly as ONE normal 24 hour day.
That is true. BUT...they ignore again the precise QUALIFIERS in the verse itself, that define the time frame there IN CONTEXT, of what that day actually is.
Yet here in Gen 2:4, as we saw in Exodus 20 & 31, we recognize AGAIN BY THE QUALIFYING TIME FRAME IN THE VERSE ITSELF, how this day is DETERMINED & DEFINED BY GOD HIMSELF.
Romans 3:1-4 What, then, is the advantage of being a Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. FIRST OF ALL, they have been entrusted with THE VERY WORDS OF GOD.
3What if some did NOT have faith? Will their lack of faith nullify God’s faithfulness?
CERTAINLY NOT! LET GOD BE TRUE & EVERY MAN A LIAR. As it is written: “So that You may be PROVED RIGHT when You speak & victorious when You judge.”
Exodus 24:3,4
Moses came & told the people all the commands of the Lord & all the ordinances. Then all the people responded with a single voice, “We will do everything THAT THE LORD HAS COMMANDED.” And Moses wrote down ALL THE WORDS OF THE LORD.
So when we look at WHAT the verse ACTUALLY SAYS, we see the qualifiers:
1) This is the 'generations of' the heavens & the earth WHEN THEY WERE CREATED!
This term, generations (Hebrew 'toledoth'), is repeated NINE TIMES throughout Genesis to describe the accounts of, the histories of, the genealogies of, the records of, the time frame of each act of history that occurs in the book of Genesis--(9 toledoths: Creation –
Genesis 2:4; Adam –
Gen 5:1; Noah & his sons –
Gen 6:9;
10:1,
32; Shem –
Gen 11:10; Terah – 11:27; Ishmael –
Gen 25:12-13;
1 Chronicles 1:29; Isaac –
Gen 25:19; Esau –
Gen 36:1,
9; Jacob –
Gen 37:2)
whether the historical record of the creation or the account of the historical real person, Adam & his lifespan & offspring--again real people in real history, living out their lives.
Yet Scripture does not stop there. It precisely defines what that day is by adding: WHEN THEY WERE CREATED.
From Genesis 1, Exodus 20 & 31 & elsewhere in Scripture, we KNOW how many days it took for God to create the heavens & the earth: 6 literal, normally understood 24 hour days. So this 'day' is summarizing the 6 days of creation WHEN God created the heavens & the earth.
AGAIN, this is precisely the meaning of the passage because the CONTEXT shows it. The first 4 verses before this describe the 7th day of rest being a literal, normally understood 24 hour period--as the verses I showed above (& there are MANY more that could be used to further show this throughout Scripture).
It again adds yet another qualifier, to erase any doubt from intelligent people of faith, as to what God precisely means here:
2) IN THE DAY that the LORD God MADE THE EARTH & THE HEAVENS...
Much information is in this short phrase but I will address just this one issue. God did not say ON the day, which would have made it a normal 24 hour day but IN, which INcludes ALL 6 days of creation, as the previous phrase indicates & as the additional supporting verses elsewhere in Scripture define.
3) This is a SUMMARY statement concerning the historical account & record (toledoth) of how God CREATED the heavens & the earth.
I mentioned earlier in a post to look at Genesis 10 & the table of nations, how they historically came about from the very beginnings of the 'toledoth' or historical record of Noah & his sons & how all the nations today came from them & their wives. I then said do some homework on those original migrations & what nations & countries we see today that came from them.
Here is a website that will help you, a lot of the homework already done.
Josephus and Genesis Chapter Ten
This is confirmed in Deuteronomy 32:8,9:
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when HE SEPARATED the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
For the LORD's portion is His people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
The Apostle Paul also FURTHER confirms (other Scriptures as well) where the Aborigines' fit in the development of countries & nations & languages. As in the DAYS of Paul & his historical record of his life in the Scriptures, there were skeptics & scoffers as to the truth of the Scriptures, so we have them today.
Acts 17:18-31 Some Epicurean & Stoic philosophers also began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” while others said, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was proclaiming the gospel of Jesus & the resurrection.
19So they took Paul & brought him to the Areopagus, where they asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you are bringing some strange notions to our ears & we want to know what they mean.”
21Now all the Athenians & foreigners who lived there SPENT THEIR TIME doing nothing more than telling & hearing new things (latest new idea).
22Then Paul stood up before the Areopagus & said, “Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious.
For as I walked around & examined your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore what you worship as something UNKNOWN, I now proclaim to you.
24The God who MADE the world & everything in it is the Lord of heaven & earth & does not live in temples made by human hands.
25Nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives all men life & breath & everything else.
26FROM ONE MAN HE MADE EVERY NATION OF MEN, TO INHABIT THE WHOLE EARTH & HE DETERMINED THEIR APPOINTED TIMES & THE BOUNDARIES OF THEIR LANDS.
27God intended that they would seek Him & perhaps reach out for Him & find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.
28‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’
As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’ Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man’s skill and imagination.
30Although God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, He now commands all men everywhere to repent. For He has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the Man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising Him from the dead.”
Hopefully these thoughts will be helpful & a comfort to you. Blessings!