No fiction about it...but "days" are obviously not what we know as 24hrs. The 24hr time and calendar was created by man, not God..man just realized the true beauty of his creation through...you guessed...science. The Bible doesnt disprove science, and science doesnt disprove the Bible...they orove each other and support each other.
Hi steppinrazor,
That's not really the truth. God created the day and the night. Now, man didn't identify that time of a complete day and night as 24 hrs. for quite a bit longer, but God created the conception of a day.
Personally, I agree with jacksbratt, because I know first of all the power and majesty of God and I fully believe that His Scriptures are intended to tell us a complete history of the created universe in which we live. Would I call it a science book? No. Would I call it true in what it tells me even though it's not a science book? Yes!!
God claims, in His word, to know the end from the beginning. He is the Alpha and the Omega. He creates things that are not, to be. Out of nothing! He doesn't need some infinitesimally small 'point' of great energy to explode to be what we see all around us. He merely need speak His desire that a thing exist and it does.
His word also tells us that God is all knowing. So, here again, I agree with jacksbratt. God knew on the day that He stepped into this black inky emptiness and proclaimed, "Let there be light!", that the day would come when His created beings would question His truth. He knew it as sure as He knows anything else. So, I fully and faithfully believe that as God was leading Moses to write down His truth of how all things came to be, He specifically and purposefully had Moses to write down for each day, "and there was evening and there was morning" of that day.
He did that so that His children could discern the truth in this argument of how long one of the creation days were in the day that God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. Knowing full well that this day, today, would come to His children. Just as any good father prepares his children for the future, God also has prepared His children for the future.
I fully and faithfully believe that there was a real purpose for God listing off the genealogies of Adam with the specific years of each father's life until that father had a specific son. God could have just had Moses write down the genealogies just as Matthew did in the gospel account. That this father begat that son and so forth on down the line until we come to Noah and then Abraham...but He didn't. Because I believe that God is wiser than I will ever hope to imagine to be, I believe that there is very, very little contained in God's word that is not exactly how He wanted it to be said. Just as Jesus proclaimed that God gave him his words to speak, I also believe that God gave Moses the very words to write.
This idea does find some support when we look into the new studies being done in letter sequencing in the Tanakh. The thinking being that the only way we could find the equidistant letter sequencing that seems to spell out so many words describing earthly events, is that God actually gave Moses the very words to write in his account of all that God had him to declare to us about God. The effect doesn't appear to work well in any other written material as it does in the Tanakh.
My understanding is that God wrote a book and that book is perfect. It is not only perfect in its foundational truth, but it is also perfect in 'how' that truth is revealed to us.
God wrote a book. In that book He describes how He created all that is in this realm of our existence in six days. Each one consisting of an evening and a morning. That pretty much denies that the period God was calling a day, could be some long age of many days. Then His book tells us that on the sixth of those days, He created man. Then He accounts for us the number of years that passed from the day that first man was created, through to Abraham. He then even gives us an accounting of days beyond Abraham as His word also gives us the years of life that a specific line of His people lived up until Joshua carries the people of God into the land of promise.
Now, I full understand that many deny these facts to be as I believe them to be. However, I also know that throughout the history of God's dealing with mankind, there has always been this tension between those who believe God and those who claim to. Judaism began with a man by the name of Abram of Ur, and yet by the time his descendants were carried out on the wings of an eagle by God, most didn't actually believe God. When the 12 spies went to look over the land, 10 of the 12 came back with fearful reports. Not believing that God really had the power to do what He had said that He would do. For that sin, the entire nation, over 20 years old at the time, died in the wilderness.
This no different. God wrote a book and He asks us to believe Him even in the face of doubt and fear and the many other theories of man as to how we got to be where we are in this the 2020th year after our Lord and Savior visited us. I'm standing with God and I find plenty of evidence that He insinuated into His account to support that belief. There's good reason that the Scriptures don't just tell us that on the first day God created some things and thus ended that first day. For me, there's good reason that the genealogies in Genesis are not listed in the same manner that Matthew listed them.
God bless,
In Christ, ted