Is the Earth Only 6,000 Years Old?
by David K. Bernard
Podcast recording (no venue stated in the delivered transcript)
Kind: teaching

Source: https://acts238.life/repository/sermons/david-k-bernard--is-the-earth-only-6000-years-old
Published by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon transcript on that page.
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let me say first of all the all the discussion of the ancient earth doesn't bother me at all it doesn't disturb my faith at all and the reason is the book of genesis was not written as a scientific textbook it was written to teach theological truths and everything the bible says is true but the bible you have to take what the bible is intending to teach and the bible is teaching within a culture so if the bible taught advanced science and explained terms and technical ways the people to whom it was given for thousands of years couldn't have understood it and even today we might pride ourselves on understanding it but what if the lord doesn't come for another 200 years a lot of things we think are true are going to be ridiculously false or naive good point and then so if we said the bible's 100 scientifically fits my ideas now well it would be considered untrue 200 years from now so if we try to force the bible into a scientific mode i think we're we're not reading it according to what's meant to be used so let me do a very simple thing the bible speaks in language that people can understand that's all about ancient people as well as modern and the bible speaks from the point of view of human experience so let me give a simple example the bible talks about the sunrise and the sunset we do that today but i would hope that most people today understand the sun doesn't literally go up and down in earth's atmosphere actually the sun is far removed from earth's atmosphere and what we're actually experiencing is the rotation of the earth right and so we see day and night because the earth is rotating but if i were to say to you wasn't that a beautiful sunset and you say brother bernard what a liar this the sun didn't set the earth rotated you should be saying wasn't that a beautiful rotation of the earth on its axis i would say you know what you're fired you know i'm not speaking inside you don't say that yes i'm not speaking scientific technicalities i'm just speaking from human experience so it's phenomenological speech how it appears to humans so in generations past uh you know the story of galileo and and the idea that uh ancient people often thought uh you know many centuries ago some thought the earth was flat um and the bible talks about the corners of the other so does that mean the bible teaches the earth is flat no the bible is just speaking from the way it looks the bible talks about genesis talks about heaven kind of like a vault or a dome so is the bible trying to teach that is scientific truth no that's the way it looks to us it looks like there's a sky up there and then when rain comes down with it there's water up there but uh or uh people believed and and that the sun rotated around the earth or the universal town around the earth but of course science has proven the earth revolves around the sun so some people thought well the bible required us to have those beliefs but we finally said you know what the bible is not trying to teach us details of science so just because it's describing these things in terms of human experience don't limit the bible and you can see many examples the book of psalms talks about god taking us under his wings under his feather so we don't think god's a giant bird we understand this is descriptive speech so i think for many reasons we don't have to take what sounds like you know if you added up the years well it's got to be six thousand years but the bible is not trying to teach you really even ancient history in that sense it's trying to teach you theological truth now so that's the first thing i would say that so there there there's atheistic evolution without god so that's clearly false we have to start with god created everything the whole universe and we as humans god created humans in his image that's absolute so then you have young earth creationism or old earth creations so let's take young earth and there there's a plausibility to it if you just read the text and try to add up the numbers you might get this idea the earth is six to ten thousand years old and is the numbers based on the genealogies is that often how they calculate that yes yes but of course if you study genealogy carefully you will understand that sometimes genealogy skip generation and when it says beget or was the father or the son of doesn't have to mean literally the immediate ancestor it could mean even remote we see this if you take time to study the genealogy of jesus in matthew several generations are skipped on purpose can you compare matthew to the old testament and and it's done for a purpose to have equal number of generations so so you do have to say you know even those genealogies you're over interpreting them if you don't allow room for um gaps this wasn't ancestry.com right right but okay but let's just take a simple example let's say that adam was immediately created what do you think maybe 21 year old adult sure okay go with that so let's say he's 20 he looks like a 21 year old he's an adult not a infant and we take him to the doctor one minute after creation and the doctor checks him out well you've got wisdom teeth so you got to be at least 21 you you're mature healthy perfectly healthy 100 percent your heart is an adult your brain is fully developed maybe maybe you're a 30 year old you know you know okay but really he's one minute old so my you'll use the demonstration god could create a human being that looks 30 years old and he's really one minute old well if god could do that god could create an earth that's one minute old but looks like a million years old however when you think that through the um and so that that's why young earth creationism could be perfectly fine you can't disprove that that that could be it but if you think that through there's so many lines of reasoning of ancient universe for example we can we study uh light travels at 186 000 miles per second we scientists have been able to to measure that well we can discover that there are stars that are many light years away and there are galaxies that are hundreds and thousands and millions of light years away which means it would have taken them that many years to get to earth so the the universe would have to be millions or billions of years old uh for for that light to get here so if god did create everything 10 000 years ago he would have had to create the light already on the way yeah so it wouldn't have come from a source he or just created it and if you look at uh geology so in my area of texas central texas the hill country it's all limestone which is created by millions of sea creatures and and and so at one time that had to be a sea now it's hills i mean i've actually gone out in those hills and found fossils of sea creatures embedded in the rock wow well how many thousands or scientists sometimes say millions of years for those creatures to be in a sea to have died been deposited turned into fossils and then through some kind of ancient earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that seabed is now a hilltop and so you find this fossil on the top of a hill well that sea creature didn't live on the top of a hill and so you're talking about or the grand canyon by modern processes how was that carved out or even tree rings now they wouldn't be millions of years old but thousands of years old so there's so many and then of course radioactive decay we could go on and on so you could either say god just accreted this with the illusion which is possible but it does cause some question would god create something that seems to be faked so like oil they say it took millions of years for that oil to form coal it was actually ancient plants that crushed under the earth under immense pressure it would take millions of years diamonds formed carbon under millions of years so god could have just created the oil without any plants and animals as predecessors but the question becomes you know would god really create a whole thing that's like fake or imaginary or you know what and of course he can do what he wants to do he's a god of miracles but it does cause a little bit unease to me that everything that appears to be is not of course you could um some young earth creations will dispute all those points but then we have to become expert scientists in geology biology astronomy i mean and if we had time we could sit down and talk about all those um but but i do think there's an easier way to look at it and here's how i look at it einstein's theory of relativity says that as you approach the speed of light time slows down so if you're actually going at the speed of light there's no passage of time that and this is counter-intuitive but but scientists have demonstrated it's true the way the universe works is there's this relationship between you know time and speed and so time is relative to the observer so an observer one place can think of time passing in a certain time but an observer that's moving would think it is shorter time and if an observer is moving at the speed of light he would say there's no time so to me that gives me a philosophical opportunity to say look when god created the universe six days well from his perspective it was six days now it's not exactly like our days because our days are measured by the sun well god was counting days before there was a son so he was doing something different than depending on the son to tell him what time it was so from god's perspective he could say imagine god's traveling pretty much the speed of light if he wants to so it could be actually six 24-hour days if you were sitting along with god with time clock but from our perspective it could be billions of years so i don't see that there's any problem in saying from god's perspective and i look at it like let's say you planted a seed if you could take a video or time lapse pictures of a seed and then it roots go down and then those roots start cracking rock and tree goes up and it becomes a mighty magnificent sequoia of hundreds of feet if you did a video of that it would look like a miracle here's this it would look like a monster movie or something here here here's this plant just you know developing well maybe genesis is that video sequence yeah here's what happened but i think it's a mistake to try to put it into science i do believe it's profoundly consistent with science because the prevailing scientific theory is that the universe started with the big bang there was nothing and they can't explain it they can't explain what was before that if if they're there there was no time so there's nothing before that no way to describe it it's it's impossible for humans to comprehend but suddenly there was this infinitesimal point that exploded and caused our known explosion of energy that all of our known universe came out of that well if you were writing thousands of years ago and god actually showed you the big bang how would you describe it in ancient terms well in the beginning god said let there be light and there was light yeah boom i mean that's to me that is a description of the big bang and the wreath what makes me so interested in that until the 20th century no humans described the universe that way so it's like we spent all this time and then people thought there might be an eternal universe or that's been disproven so really god's word saying there was a beginning and it began with an explosion of light or energy it's profoundly true the only thing we have to say is god is the author of that so to my mind there really is no problem saying the universe is billions of years old or even the earth is billions of years old i believe that's compatible with the discussion genesis now if you want to do some research there's a book by gerald rao r-a-w i think he's the editor it's called mapping the origins debate six models so i think he has young earth creationism old earth creationism and various variations so you can look at that john collins has a very good book genesis one through four which he goes through genesis one through four discuss it theologically but also discusses how would it relate to modern science from a biblical conservative biblical perspective and then john lennox uh l-e-n-n-o-x seven days that divide the world so he also goes through the seven days you know the six days of creation plus the seventh day of rest and describes it theologically but also how it is compatible with the discussions of science i will also add that you know the reason why a lot of people fight against old earth is they think it's a concession to evolutionism well we that's a another great discussion of how did god actually create but you don't have to buy into that and certainly i would reject any form of atheistic evolution but even theistic evolution that that seems to relegate god to the sidelines and just goes through evolution there's a good book it's rather in-depth but it's jpmorland m-o-r-e-l-a-n-d he edits it it's called theistic evolution but it's actually a critique of theistic evolution from a conservative christian perspective saying just trying to say evolution answers everything um it has a very extensive explanation by many authors from a theological scientific perspective that to say that's inadequate but i do want to summarize with this because when you're trying to win souls i don't think we have to fight this battle i'll give you an example i had a businessman come to me when i was a pastor he says you know he was very touched by our services and felt the presence of god but he said i can't believe this because i believe in evolution i said look we could sit down and i could give you all the flaws i'll give you books to read but really that doesn't really matter right now what you need to understand is god is a creator and all the dress is details he says well how can i believe the bible says the bible is not trying to teach on evolution or age of the earth it's not trying to teach those things it's trying to teach that god is a creator that's what you have to understand but let me give you this the bible says that humans are sinners it's the only book of philosophy or rich or religion that basically says the essential problems with humans we're sinners every other book tries to tell you how you can improve yourself through meditation through good works through believing in some deity you can improve yourself the bible says you can't improve yourself you need a savior jesus christ but you know what that's a universal truth g k chesterson said the one doctrine of the bible that can be empirically proved is all have sinned every human being knows even if they don't believe in the bible they know they have violated their own conscience what they said was right and wrong they violate they've lied they've cheated they've stolen every human being if you're honest you know that you've sinned well of all the books and religions and philosophies of the world only the bible is bold enough and honest enough to say your root problem is your center well if the bible tells us the truth on the most fundamental truth of our lives and nobody else will then we can trust the bible when it talks about creation which nobody's seen or when it talks about the life to come which nobody's been there we trust it on those extremes because we know it's telling the truth and so if you will repent and you'll be baptized in jesus name you'll receive the holy ghost you will experience the truth of the bible for yourself then that will give you confidence to go back and say genesis is right god created the universe and whatever the details we know that fundamentally we need to accept god as our creator