The Avalanche of Time

In his Genesis 1 commentary, and other places, J. Vernon McGee points out the way that the Bible tells time.


The first 11 chapters of Genesis cover a minimum of two thousand years.  Yes people used to be dogmatic about that, but that was before the fields of mythology and astronomy existed.  History was a field of endeavor but barely recognizable to us today, and physics and biology were in such a state as to be considered "quaint" today.  I don't even have to squint to think that it would be extremely easy to say that Genesis 1-11 could cover several hundred thousand years.  And it's even easier for me to say that it could cover any amount of time you might need to conceive of to help you sleep at night if you feel the need to collate something you've read there with some other belief system.  I don't think it is at all a bastardization of the text to think of it in terms of eons.  Eon is a nice Greek word that would not have been around in the Hebrew version of Genesis, but the idea of untold ages in certainly not out of the question in Genesis.  It's not just a response to what Darwin; that important theologian thought- the text itself lends credence to those ideas.

Today at work I was talking with someone about the world before Adam and the world after The Last Adam; which is Jesus.  There was no sun until the third day- or at least no sun mentioned.  And in The New Jerusalem, Jesus will take His rightful place as the source of light and there will be no sun there.  But there will also be no night.  My friend was pointing out that our concept of time might be completely different when we're no longer revolving around the sun.  Our time is sun-centric because that is where we are now.

The rest of Genesis, chapters 12 through 50, takes place over three hundred and fifty years.  Chapter 1 – 11 takes place over a minimum of two thousand years, and that is just as long as the rest of the Bible in total.  God spends more time and text talking about Abraham than talking about the entire physical universe.  The avalanche continues at a breakneck speed.

Genesis is the first of the Bible's books.  The gospels, which are only about one person, have 89 chapters in total and only four chapters cover the first 30 years of his life.  Eighty five of the 89 chapters cover only three years and twenty seven chapters out of the 89 only cover about eight days.

Moses would be amused at theologian and scientist accounts of creation which is just a few preliminary facts.  That’s not the story at all, but it's a great story.  Creation is but the setting for a story about redemption.