Thanks Admin.
I am a lover of the word of God and of Jesus Christ its centrality. And sometimes I will sound like it. Exegisis of the Bible for me does not mean “Exit - Jesus.”
This does not mean that if you don’t agree with me you necessarily don’t love God. It means to me that any study of the Bible purposely ignoring God’s economy and Christ’s salvation is, I think, a waste of time and an abuse of the Scripture.
Apostle began with:
The Gap Theory
One such attempt at reconciling the Biblical account of Creation with the belief that the universe is 16 billion years old came from Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) the first Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland.
True. Chalmers did use Destruction / Reconstruction as an apologetic. But Chalmers by no means was the first to have a Gap understanding of
Genesis 1:1,1:2. And the records I have show that such a view predates the invention of geology or evolutionary theory.
Second point. There is nothing basically wrong with Christians going back to the Scripture to examine carefully exactly what was said.
Were there three wise men who came to visit the baby Jesus? Millions of Christians would give a resounding “Yes! We all know three wise men came from the east.” Then one day someone goes back to see for sure what the Scripture says. It says wise men (plural). That is all. They brought three gifts. Could two or seven or thirteen or sixteen wise men bring three gifts? Of course. Then the number of wise men is unspecified actually.
So with Gap Theory. Not all returning to the Scripture to ascertain exactly what was written need be accused of “accomodation.”
There are three basic premises to the Gap Theorist thought. First, they insist on a literal view of Genesis. Second they believe in a very long but unknown age of the earth. To fit premise 2 into premise one, the Gap theorist states that the origin of most of the geological strata and geological evidence can be fit in between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 due what they refer to as Lucifer's flood.
I haven’t read Chalmers. But of the several writings I have read on an Interval, none ever mentioned the phrase “Lucifer’s flood.”
Young Earth understandings of the Bible go elsewhere in the Bible to pick up clues to help them to understand Genesis. By going outside of Genesis to other books of the Bible they determine that the serpent in the garden has something to do with Satan God’s enemy.
In the same way some of us gather from other portions of the Bible that what is discribed as the condition of the earth -
“without form and void” indicates previous divine judgement. Separately the words do not always indicate that. But used together elsewhere in the Bible they indicated a previous divine overthrow.
The two words are found together only in two other places in Scripture. Both passages clearly express the ruin caused by an outpouring of God’a wrath.
In the prophecy of Isaiah, after the fearful description of fall of Idumea in the day of vengence
(Isa.34:11):
“He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones (or, as better Pember says should be tranlated - plummet) - of emptiness.”
Now
“confusion” and
“emptiness” are, in Hebrew, the same words as those rendered “without form and void” in Genesis 1:2. The sense in Isa. 34:11 is that just as the archatect uses a line and plummet in order to raise a building with precise perfection, so will God exercise His skill to make an exacting and complete ruin of the sinful Idumea.
The second passage where we see the Hebrew words used together in is the description of Judah’s and Jerusalem’s devastation:
“I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. I beheld, and , lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled . the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the Lord, and by His fierce anger. For thus hath the Lord said, The whole land shall be desolate; yet will I not make a full end” (Jermiah 4:23-27).
Here tohu signifies “desolation” or “that which is desolate”; and bohu signifies “emptiness” or “that which is empty.” This fearful scene of destruction might have even been a poetic parallel to destruction of the pre-Adamic world. I mean that Jeremiah may have been prophetically superimposing that previous pre-Adamic judgment on the scene of God’s wrath upon Judah and Jerusalem.
A Jewish rabbi around the third century wrote of a Destruction / Reconstruction view of Genesis in The Book of Light or Sefer Hazzohar (also known as simply Zohar). This work is attributed by some to a certain Simon ben Jochai. He was a disciple of Akiba ben Joseph who founded the School Bene Barek and was himself executed in 135 A.D.
At the end of the first century A.D. we have this opinion among Hebrew reading scholars of Genesis seen in Simeon’s ben Jochai’s comment on Genesis 2:4-6:
“These are the generations (ie., this is the history of . ) of the heavens and the earth . And these are generations of the destruction of which is signified in verse 2 of chapter 1. The earth was Tohu and Bohu. These indeed are the worlds of which it is said that the blessed God created them and destroyed them, and, on that account, the earth was desolate and empty.”
I don’t think that this writer was tying to accommodate the Scripture to popular geological theories of the 18th century. Nor is it likely that he was defending the Hebrew Bible from attacks of Evolutionary Theory.
He sees in Genesis the divine destruction upon previous worlds which rendered the earth without form and void in Genesis 1:2. That is after God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning, some unspecified time before His reformation in six days and His further creative activity, He destroyed the pre-Admic world.
Arthur Custance informs us that the Midrash is the oldest pre-Christian exposition of the Old Testament. It contains accumulated comments and explanations of the best Jewish teachers during and after the Babylonian Captivity over a span of 1500 years and well into the Christian era. Custance says that the Revized Edition of Chambers Encyclopedia states that an interval of unspecified duration interposed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 was already found in the Midrash.
Louis Ginsberg, in his work, The Legends of the Jews, put into a continuous narrative , as close as he possibly could using the phrases and terms the Jews used to pass down their sacred history in legends. Volume I covers the period between Creation and Jacob. And Ginsburgs narrative has this excerpt on Genesis 1:
“Nor is this world inhabited by man the first of the things earthly created by God. He made several other worlds before ours, but He destroyed them all, because He was pleased with none until He created ours.”
It is also interesting to me that a Psalm on God’s establishing of the earth seems to harmonize with the thought of Him causing the dry land to come up from underneath the waters. Psalm 104 seems very much a psalm on God as Creator and Provider:
“Bless Jehovah, O my soul. O Jehovah my God, You are cery great. You are clothed with majesty and splendot . You stretch out the heavens like a tent curtain . He established the earth upon its foundations, So that it cannot be moved forever and ever. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; The waters stood above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled; At the voice of Your thunder they rushed away - The mountains rose, the valleys sank - To the place that You established for them. To the plave that You established for them. You set a border that they may not pass over, that they may not turn back to cover the earth.” (See Psalm 104:1-9).
If this is a Psalm of God’s creative work in Genesis it does show Him rebuking and limiting the waters which cover the dry land. He sets a border and a boundary that the water is not to transgress.
Latter we will see that in the new heaven and the new earth the abolishing of death is in conjuction with the abolishing of the sea. There is definetly something revelatory about God’s treatment of the sea which runs concurrent with His abolishing of death.
As the Young Earth expositor gathers light on other passages concerning the serpent, because Genesis did not explicitly tell us of this serpent’s identity, so also the Destruction / Reconstructionist or “Gap Theorist” has light shed on Genesis 1:1-2 from other passages. There is no ground for the former to charge the latter with spurious explanations of things which are not altogether explicitly written in Genesis in detail. We "Gap Theorists" believe that the details both on the serpent and the pre-Adamic judgment are provided latter in the revelation of the Scripture.
Weston Fields, author of Unformed and Unfilled provides the following explanation of the Gap Theory.
In the far distant, dateless past, God created a perfect heaven and a perfect earth. Satan was the ruler of the earth, which was peopled by a race of men without souls. Eventually, Satan who dwelled in the Garden of Eden composed of minerals, rebelled by desiring to become like God. Because of Satan's fall, sin entered the universe and brought on the Earth God's judgement, in the form of a Flood (indicated by the water of Genesis 1:2), and then a global ice age, where the light and heat from the sun were somehow removed.
Much of this sounds like G.H. Pember’s
Earth's Earliest Ages.
I will latter develop plausible proofs of the following:
1. The Scripture does show a class of beings elder to man and elder among the angelic beings from which an entity like Satan could arise.
2. The scripture does show a class of beings who are the disembodied spirits of creatures who must have been previously judged by God.
3. The Scripture does show a class of demonic beings which seemed to be kept in special confinement until their release at the end of the age. Nothing of their creation is remotely hinted at in Genesis.
4. The mandate assigned the first created man seems to indicate that there was an opposition party and advasary to God in existence already even when God pronounced that the creation was
“very good” in Genesis 1:31.
Apostle goes on with a summary of typoical Gap Theory ideas:
All the plant, animal and human fossils upon the Earth today date back from this 'Lucifer's Flood,' and do not bear any genetic relationship with the plants, animals and fossils living upon the Earth today."
Not one of the several books or articles on Destruction / Reconstruction that I have studied refered to “Lucifer’s Flood.”
They did talk about God’s judgment upon the pre-Adamic earth which was under the Anointed Cherub’s authority. And that being became Satan. And God created man afterward and said now “Let THEM have dominion . ” (emphasis mine). The dominion which was previously assigned to another being was transferred to man. And this creature man was also to harmonize with God’s desire to execute His enemies.
God would not fight against His enemy alone. He would not be the Creator to fight against the creature. He would create another creature whose will being in harmony with the divine will, would coordinate with God in the destruction of Satan.
In Isaiah’s prophecy we see that God longs for man to be one with His heart and will to the degree that man would even command God to act to carry out His will:
“
Thus says Jehovah, The Holy One of Israel and the One who formed him,
Ask Me about the things to come concerning My sons, and concerning the works of My hands, command Me” (Isaiah 45:11).
God here desires that man would ask and even command Him to do His will, man being so much in oneness with His desire. And we see the same matter in the New Testament:
“If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.” (John 15:7).
This is not frivolous asking. This is the petition of God that comes out of His people abiding in Christ and Christ’s word abiding in them. The principle is as old as Genesis. If man remains in obediance and cooperation with God, man has authority to ask God and even to command God.
1.) First God has a will and desire.
2.) He has man on the earth who is one with Him
3.) Because of this oneness of His creature with Himself the desire of man echoes the desire of God.
4.) Man then asks or even commands, and God responds to fulfill His desire.
Satan was pree-existent to Adam. And the created new creature was to guard God’s interests on the earth. I have no doubt that had Adam, in his mandate to guard the garden, would have eventually realized that a lying creature as seen in the serpent, had no place in God’s creation.
God, who had commited to man His image and His dominion, waited for man to command God to destroy the ancient pre-Adamic Anointed Cherub, who had become Satan. God had given the sentence. God had created man to assist Him to carry out the execution.
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