17:8). What conceivable purpose could God have had in interposing a billion years of suffering and death in the animal kingdom prior to implementing His great plan of salvation for lost men and women? Our Lord is neither cruel nor capricious, and He would never be guilty of such pointless sadism. A further question is why so many evangelical Christians seem eager to advocate such an unworthy and demeaning compromise!
Beginning with Abel (the first prophet of God according to Jesus in Luke 11:51), God sent prophet after prophet to transmit His Word to men. More often than not their message was opposed, even to the point of bloodshed, and this persecution also has been going on from the beginning. Jesus himself referred to “the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world” (Luke 11:50). That is, God’s prophets have been preaching and dying since the very foundation of the world — not starting five billion years later.
This opposition to God’s plan has been instigated by Satan himself. Jesus called Satan “a liar, and the father of it,” as well as “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). He had not only deceived Eve with his humanistic philosophy: “Ye shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5), but also he had caused Cain to murder God’s first prophet, his brother Abel. This, too, was at “the beginning,” not five billion years after the beginning, for even if animals had been dying for a billion years before this, as theistic evolutionists assert, their deaths could not be called “murders.” Note also 1 John 3:8: “The devil sinneth from the beginning.”
There is yet coming a time of God’s great wrath on this unbelieving world. Again it was Jesus who said: “In those days shall be affliction, such as was not since the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time” (Mark 13:19). The clear premise of this prophecy by Christ was that there had, indeed, been tribulation and affliction “since the beginning of the creation which God created” (and, therefore, people had been on the earth all during that time), but that the coming period of “great tribulation” would be still worse.
Also note that, according to these words of Christ, the creation had both a “beginning” and would have a termination (“created” is in the past tense, in consistency with the use of this word all through the Bible). The world and its inhabitants are not continuously being created, as evolutionists and many progressive creationists would have us believe, for the creation was a completed event in the past. See also Hebrews 4:3 for a clear affirmation that all God’s “works were finished from the foundation of the world.”
Thus, the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things were created in the beginning, has repeatedly made it clear that the supposed billions of years of a groaning, travailing creation (note Rom. 8:22) prior to man’s creation and fall never existed at all. God created men and women at the beginning, and then, when Adam sinned, He quickly began to implement His great plan of redemption. To the redeemed He has promised “a kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34), without the slightest intimation that there would be a 15-billion-year prelude before He would even start His program of redemption.
The same emphasis was later carried forward by His apostles. Peter, for example, promised the imminent return of Christ, “whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began” (Acts 3:21).
Similarly, at the birth of John the Baptist, the prophet/priest Zechariah emphasized that God’s “horn of salvation” was coming, “as he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began” (Luke 1:69–70). Thus, just before and just after Christ’s earthly ministry, we are assured that Jesus spoke clearly and truly when He said that God’s prophets have been transmitting God’s Word to man not just since human history began, but “since the world began.” Therefore, the world and its human inhabitants began at essentially the same time.
Consider also this testimony of the apostle Paul: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). This powerful verse explicitly tells us that the evidences of God can be seen so clearly in His created world that it is inexcusable for people not to see them. Furthermore, these evidences were being seen and understood by people, not just since a certain imaginary population of evolving hominids somehow acquired souls, but “from the creation of the world.”
Lest anyone equivocate over the meaning of “world,” note that two different Greek words have been translated as “world” in the passages cited above. In Matthew 13:35, 25:34; Luke 11:50; Hebrews 1:10, 4:3; 1 Peter 1:20; Revelation 13:8, 17:8; and Romans 1:20, the Greek word is kosmos. In Matthew 24:21 and Acts 3:21, the word is aion. As defined in Strong’s Greek Dictionary of the New Testament, kosmos means an “orderly arrangement” (that is, a cosmos instead of a chaos), referring in biblical context to the fact that the heavens, the earth, life, man, and man’s systems had been divinely designed and arranged, not randomly produced by chance processes.
Aion is defined as “age,” and also as “world,” thus carrying the concept of both time and matter. In modern terminology it suggests the space-time-matter “continuum” that constitutes our physical universe. Therefore, whether the “world” in these texts is considered as the universe of space, time, and matter, or as the orderly structure of all its components, it does not make any difference as far as the time of creation is concerned. People have been a part of the created world since both the beginning of time and the foundation of the world.
This, of course, is also the teaching of all Old Testament passages dealing with this subject, as well as of many other New Testament verses. In Henry Morris’s book Biblical Creationism, every passage in the Bible dealing in any way with the subject of creation is analyzed, with the conclusion that the unequivocal teaching of the whole Bible is recent creation of all things. There is no hint of long geological or astronomical ages before man anywhere in the Bible.
Why, then, do so many Christians insist that we should believe in these long ages, pushing our Creator as far out in space and as far back in time as we possibly can? The apparent reason is that they feel it is more important to be “scientific” (as currently defined) than biblical (as eternally defined, Ps. 119:89). The statement of Dr. Pattle P. T. Pun, professor of biology at Wheaton College, is typical.
It is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of the Genesis record, without regard to all the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science [emphasis mine] is that God created heaven and earth in six solar days. . . . However, the recent creationist position . . . has denied and belittled the vast amount of scientific evidence amassed to support the theory of natural selection and the antiquity of the earth.5
Although Dr. Pun is reputedly a sincere and gracious Christian, he feels, nevertheless, that we must base our biblical hermeneutics on “science,” and the same is apparently true of most of his colleagues at Wheaton College and in the American Scientific Affiliation, as well as of numerous leading theologians, scientists, and educators throughout the evangelical world.
Although ICR scientists (with academic qualifications at least equal to those of Dr. Pun and his colleagues), as well as large numbers of other creationist scientists in many fields, hold the greatest respect for true science (i.e., knowledge, not naturalistic extrapolation), we believe that the clear teachings of Jesus Christ — as well as of God’s Word in general — must be given higher priority. His approval has far greater value in the light of eternity than that of our professional peers, and He taught that the world is young.
1 Henry M. Morris, History of Modern Creationism (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1993).
2 See Henry Morris’s book Biblical Creationism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1993, 276 p.), in which every passage in the Bible dealing with creation and primeval history is carefully examined. The uniform teaching of the whole Bible is that of a recent, supernatural, completed creation