The short answer is yes - the longer answer must include the authority given to the apostles by Christ, with the assurance He would ensure their testimony was truthful. We also rely on guidance by the Spirit to recognise the truth, and this requires faith. The Church must rely on this authority regarding scripture.
Regarding our obvious weaknesses, the Gospels show in detail the weakness displayed by the disciples, even when Christ Himself was teaching them.
In Genesis (which is what I assume you are talking about) it says: “And God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. And God called the Light day, and the darkness he called night.” (any mistakes in the above quotation are, naturally, my own, not the Bible’s). This seems to imply that the length of time exists (at least to God) independently of the heavenly bodies (which were created later “for marking signs and seasons.”
@gbrooks9
If this is in response to my previous post, I am confused. I maintain that most Christians conflate the two passages from John-- John 14:6 quotes Jesus as saying that he is the only way to the Father. John 6:44 quotes him as saying that no one becomes Jesus’ disciple unless the Father calls him, which has almost the opposite meaning.
You must not find this disturbing.
Al Leo
You are correct. These two statements make logical sense together in light of the Trinitarian nature of God (e.g: Jesus and The Father are separate persons, but one God).
To be fair, however, the Trinity does defy human understanding…
@J.E.S, it seems to imply?
Do you understand that the length of a “day” changes every day during the year?
There are minutes of difference between a day as measured by the sun vs. a day measured by the background stars.
Do you understand that the approximation of 24 hours per day has actually changed with each century? The Moon’s pull has slowed down the Earth’s rotations by as much as 3 hours since a baseline of 600 million years ago.
From the Wiki article on Earth’s Rotation we read:
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"This gradual rotational deceleration is empirically documented with estimates of day lengths obtained from observations of tidal rhythmites and stromatolites; a compilation of these measurements found the length of day to increase steadily from about 21 hours at 600Myr ago to the current 24 hour value."
“By counting the microscopic lamina that form at higher tides, tidal frequencies (and thus day lengths) can be estimated, much like counting tree rings, though these estimates can be increasingly unreliable at older ages.”
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In fact, early in its “Creation” the Earth was a whirling demon … spinning like crazy! This link from Scientific American is a surprise:
“Most computer simulations of this explosive lunar genesis suggest that Earth whirled afterward on its axis every six hours, says Jay Melosh, an Earth and atmospheric scientist at Purdue University.” [< At that time, the Moon orbited the Earth very closely, and has unrelentingly drifted further and further away from the Earth, slowing down the Earth’s rotation to a surprising extent in the process!]
“As the moon has migrated out from an initial tighter orbit of perhaps 25,000 kilometersto the modern average distance of 384,000 kilometers, it has teamed up with the sun to protract Earthly days fourfold.”
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A couple questions:
No, I think he’s getting that from actual measurements. Here’s a list of old things:
A Day certainly has never quite been 24 hours and never will be. So to have a literal, exact 24 hour period is incorrect perhaps?
I would submit that only God knows the “standard” length of a day…
@pevaquark
@gbrooks9
I’m sorry, what??? We have actual measurements that can tell us how long a day was from hundreds of millions of years ago. By this definition I mean a day = one rotation around our axis. Like this one for example:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/1999RG900016/abstract
You seem to know a lot about how to interpret God’s use of the word “Day”. But if you were not there from Day 1 to Day 3, and the Sun was not there from Day 1 to Day 3, how is it a Day?
Certainly this is the clue that tells us that the 6 days of Creation is beautiful but figurative speech …
@J.E.S, I am most definitely assuming that the Earth is more than 5 billion years old… and that’s a lotta lotta days…
This collection of images was collected in a moment of inspiration triggered by @pevaquark …
Ice Cores provide eye witness testimony to over 100,000 years of uninterrupted arctic history … with nary a flood, or even a visit by Enoch. And yet this crystal clear evidence is set aside over the speculated meaning of a few sentences about days without suns, birds created before land creatures, and the division of all space above the earth into a second ocean …
Be sure you click on the image to see it at full zoom - - and enjoy the wealth of information on just ice … and the purity of the information derived!
@gbrooks9
@Christy
@jammycakes
@Bill_II
@cwhenderson
@GJDS
@aleo
@Mervin_Bitikofer
@pevaquark
(@anybody who’s username I don’t remember)
I stumbled upon this verse from Exodus today:
“For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.Therefore, the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:11)
Any mistakes or errors are, naturally, my own (not scriptures’s).
Here God says that he made the universe in 6 literal days…again.
I’m not going to argue with you. Yep, that’s what it says. Do you want to discuss what it means?
@Christy
Yes…
What are your thoughts???
Wait a second. I never saw that before. Ok…this…is…big. Mentally, like I just threw out all that data of 30 different ways we know as a matter of fact that the universe is extremely old. Like the entire enterprise of science is pretty much dead to me. I am pretty excited as I always hated those evolutionists.
I am now speed reading the books of Moses. I also found some other reasons we are supposed to have the Sabbath real quick (Deuteronomy 5:12-15). Strange, it seems that we are supposed to observe the Sabbath because of the Exodus, not creation. Also weird the 7th day in Genesis doesn’t even have morning and evening. I don’t see how that day could be 24 hours.
I also learned about the practice of Shmita. Wait a second. That is also the pattern of seven but it’s seven years, not seven days.
That doesn’t seem to be what the verse I quoted above says…
This came up a few days ago on a different thread. You can check my response here. What biblical reasons are there to accept the scientific view of the earth as billions of years old? - #18 by cwhenderson
If (gleaned from your linked post) I am to assume that you don’t think God needed a day of rest…
Why did God need to use Evolution (used in a broad sense) to create the world? (Or why do you think He had to have used it?)
Agreed, I do not believe the Almighty God needed a day of rest. Neither do I believe that He needed to use evolution. He could have used any tool He wished (or no tool at all), but I believe based on the scientific evidence in multiple fields that evolution is the tool He chose for the creative work.
Deuteronomy 5:12-15
12 Be careful to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy as the Lord your God has commanded you. 13 You are to labor six days and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, your ox or donkey, any of your livestock, or the resident alien who lives within your city gates, so that your male and female slaves may rest as you do. 15 Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
I also showed you a pattern of sevens in the Old Testament that is also based upon this pattern, six ______ of work and one _______ of rest. It is a pattern that they followed and thus the Genesis narrative was written to follow that pattern. Do you think that God needed to do things in 7 days? Or was it written that way for the Israelites? In other words, it is a general pattern that the text was written in that applies to different things in their culture. Weekly it was 6 days of work and a Sabbath rest. The land had six years of work and one year of rest. Why were they in Babylon for ‘70’ years? Because they ignored God’s Sabbath year for 490 years and he was making them obey it.
Here are some pretty conservative writers that also seem to notice that the number seven holds particular meaning and thus appears all over the place. 7 literal 24 hour days in Genesis is not even the point, why 7 days? 7 is the number of completeness or divine perfection. It says that mankind is made on day 6 because 6 is the number of man. That’s why.
You just come in here and completely hand wave one single Scripture that somehow can mean you get to reject everything we’ve said previously.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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