I am sorry but I am claiming that your use of Scripture is wrong and therefore the “gap” does not exist. It is based on examining Scripture beyond where it is meant and therefore producing theology that should not exist.
Richard
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Ok Richard. If God’s gap does not exist then simply use the Scriptures to show that God’s gap that I claim starts after day the sixth of the creation and ends when Adam sinned, does not exist. In other words use the Bible only to prove that Adam and Eve were not in the Garden in Eden from the end of day the sixth until they were booted in this manner on the first day of sin:
Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Genesis 3:23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
Genesis 3:24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
Thanks,
Paul Aarons
You just don’t get it.
You can “use the Bible” to prove virtually anything. That does not mean that the Bible meant to say it.
I am not going to play on your playing field any more than I play on a scientific one.
Richard
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You are setting us an impossible task. You require that we use your hermeneutics to argue against your “gap”. You will not accept that it is your hermeneutics that are incorrect. Which would explain why you don’t a response from different Christian groups.
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Richard,
You are definitely right here. That’s why I know of Christian groups on the Internet who affirm by the Bible only that salvation ended on May 21, 2011 and that the ending world judgment started on May 21, 2011 and is ongoing for 22 years until 2033 when everything will end. And, yes, dear Richard, they too operate from their own Biblical Calendar in which they have not God’s gap and so purport falsely that they know the year of the creation and consequently that same calendar tells them that the end is in 2033. They did field hard questions to God’s gap but my Heavenly Father stepped with His answers from Scripture, so they just wished me away quietly so they could continue on with their falsehoods. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. And so I agree too about myself that I too might be deceived about God’s gap. Hence, I am on this forum hoping that a neighbor will come after me, search out Scripturally what I am saying, and then show the unjust findings:
Proverbs 18:17 He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him.
Thanks,
Paul Aarons
I am sorry, but I am not in a position to help you with this. It would take a detailed analysis of your findings and how you interpret them and I am not prepared to devote that much time and effort when my initial thoughts are that it is a fool’s errand. I appreciate the time and effort that you have put in and what you have invested. But, it is not important to me either way. IOW I do not see the need to know what you are trying to discover. it is not relevant to my faith.
I wish you well
Richard
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Very well said. Thanks RichardG for stopping by and contributing your thoughts.
Paul Aarons
Repeating errors does not make your position stronger. You are reading “earth” incorrectly, using a meaning that arose due to the account being translated into Greek and then into Latin and a tradition of understanding building up from the change.
I haven’t been engaging in any reasonings, I’ve been correcting things you have wrong. When you get the meanings of words wrong, you can’t claim to be basing your position on scripture; when you fail to pay attention to context, you can’t claim to be basing your position on scripture.
Don’t mix worldviews. Unless you can show me a cruise ship in Genesis, this is just word salad.’
You haven’t been doing that so far! You’ve bragged, insulted, misinterpreted, refused to learn, always arrogantly assuming that you know God’s mind despite the fact that there is no scripture whatsoever to back your claim.
My “source of wisdom” is the text – the Hebrew text, not any translation.
No, you aren’t, because you refuse to acknowledge anything that doesn’t agree with you. Calling it “God’s gap” when there is no gap indicated is stiff-necked and haughty. You have failed to show why the writer was wrong when he stated how many years Adam had lived, you have failed to treat the scripture with the respect due the Holy Spirit by refusing to learn what words mean, and you haven’t even bothered to notice the very possible gaps in the account that don’t require treating the inspired writer as unable to count.
That’s already been done. You only get a “gap” if you maintain that the writer the Holy Spirit chose didn’t know how to count and/or falsely stated Adam’s age. So your gap comes from your own imagination (something the apostle warned against).
Yep. By picking and choosing verses, you can argue in favor of Marxism, or reincarnation, even for the superiority of all the “races” except black. Yes, it’s not hard to counter the reincarnation arguments, but the other two?
Quite – he can’t see that his basic assumption that the writer got Adam’s age wrong undermines everything he’s saying. Nothing in the text even slightly suggests that the writer didn’t count from when Adam was made; the word covers all of Adam’s life, not just after the Garden – it’s a totally made-up idea.
Oh the arrogance! It’s your gap because you invented it – you didn’t get it from the text, you got it from assuming that the writer didn’t know how to count.
Personally I don’t think there’s any way to tell how long the Eden interval lasted, but I also know that it doesn’t make any difference because the account is not meant as history – it’s not that kind of literature.
And therein lies your error: you assume that you know what kind of literature you’re reading when all you have is a translation and you refuse to undertake the study needed to at least move closer to how the original audience understood it. That means your hermeneutics are inherently bad because you do not start from a position of respecting the text.
It’s not relevant to anything except someone’s itch to know things God didn’t bother to make clear; it’s not relevant to understanding any teaching from the Bible at all – it certainly isn’t relevant to the Gospel!
And unless you’re aiming to further the Gospel, you’re not doing Christian thinking anyway.
Hi St.Roymond
Since you continue to push me into much more greater details about God’s gap before Adam’s 930 years and after the six days of the creation then
I will continue my earlier post with quoting from my recent daily Bible Study to show the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers:
“In Bible Hebrew, the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers is as follows:
Cardinal numbers:
- Are used to count and express the quantity or amount of something.
- Are usually formed using the masculine and feminine forms of the numbers (e.g., אחד (one), שני (two), שלושה (three), etc.).
- Are used in most cases, including counting, measuring, and quantifying.
Ordinal numbers:
- Are used to describe the position or rank of something in a sequence or order.
- Are usually formed using the construct form of the numbers (e.g., בכור (first), שני (second), שלישי (third), etc.).
- Are used to indicate the order or sequence of events, items, or people.
For example:
- Cardinal: “I have three sons” (שלושה בנים לי).
- Ordinal: “He is the third son” (הוא השלישי).”
I wrote the study because I had similar push back from famous Christian Apologetic YEC personnel and a famous scientists who is on YouTube with abiogenesis. Now if you or anyone else push further and I get permission to continue copying from my daily Bible Study then I will. Thanks very much for your input.
Paul Aarons
Historical!!! Well, Jesus considered Adam and Eve as historical:
Matthew 19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
And this is where we read as instructed:
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And the Jesus continued:
Matthew 19:5 And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?
And we read:
Genesis 2:23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Genesis 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
Then my namesake considered Adam and Eve to be historical. See what he wrote showing that Adam was as human and historical as Moses:
Romans 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.
But I will stop there. Thanks for your input.
Paul Aarons
Please read in the thread above where I showed in a post why God’s gap is also my gap. It became mine when He opened my understanding and I believed it. It’s just like He did this for me:
John 6:29 Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.
Once the work of believing is effected in me then that faith from believing is my faith. Got it?
Anyway, I am waiting for Scriptures tat will show that my gap (God’s gap) is false.
Thanks,
Paul Aarons
You have yet to show any evidence from the scriptures that this gap of yours is anything more than your imagination at work. You’re asking people to disprove something for which there is no evidence!
No, all He did there was refer to the scripture and what it said. Nothing says He considered them historical, only that He considered it authoritative.
That one is a stronger argument.
That’s your claim. Since there is nothing in the text to suggest that there is a gap, I see nothing but your imagination. If there was really a gap there, scholars would have noted it long ago. If the years stated that Adam lived weren’t all the ones he lived, there would be some indication.
What you had was a false “Aha!” moment. Those are a great way to embrace error; they’re how cults get started. The remedy is to rely on the text of scripture and to not claim anything it does not. You are claiming something that neither any Jewish scholars nor Christian ones have ever seen before, which is astoundingly arrogant!
The number given for the length of Adam’s life shows it. The text does not say, “Adam lived 930 years after being ejected from the Garden”, it says Adam lived 930 years – period.
Well, how about this, my friend, St.Roymond?
Genesis 4:1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
Genesis 4:2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
Genesis 4:8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
And Jesus testified about the historical Abel in this manner:
Matthew 23:34 Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city:
Matthew 23:35 That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.
Matthew 23:36 Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.
Can Abel be historical and Adam and Eve, his human parents be allegorical?
And Jesus Christ’s younger brother Jude testified that wrote about Cain as a historical figure just as historical as Balaam:
Jude 1:11 Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.
So Jude would say that Cain’s parents, Adam and Eve, were historical persons.
I love and embrace every Word of God. I encourage all others to do the same quickly. Thanks for sharing.
I really don’t have the time or inclination to respond to all your comments as I write daily Bible Studies and have a family plus household chores and a host of other questions from my fellowship group that I have not had time to even read😪. Therefore I just read your comments (some of which U already answered in much earlier posts that you obviously have not read and which posts were before you started to respond) and only those my Heavenly Father gives me His downloads to respond will I answer in this manner:
1 Peter 3:15 (LSB) but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and fear,
Paul Aarons
That’s a decent one for your argument.
I got sidetracked here due to the deficient translation at the end. But it doesn’t show anything except that that the writer recognized that his audience knew those stories and would understand his point.
It just hit me what you remind me of: a guy who had the same certainty that he was getting his ideas from God. The fruit of that attitude tends to be triggering others to believe that they were getting their ideas from God, and that’s what happened – and as a result the group split, and split again, and split again, because people were sure they were getting their ideas from God.
That’s the practical issue. The scriptural issue is that there is no foundation in the text of any part of the Bible for him – or for you – to make such a claim.
Hi St.Roymond,
I am continuing tonight to answer your question on God’s counting of the six days of the creation and providing you the evidence that He did in fact count out those days as we would count days today. Therefore, I again copy below from part of my recent daily Bible Study addressing this very topic and which is the portion following the above already copied portions posted earlier in this topic:
“Now by way of my using the Blue Letter Bible’s Hebrew Interlinear, I show the following verses where God is counting off His days of the creation employing both cardinal and ordinal numbers and with appropriate understandings afterwards:
Genesis 1:5 (YLT) and God calleth to the light ‘Day (12 hour daylight),’ and to the darkness He hath called ‘Night (12 hours);’ and there is an evening, and there is a morning – day (24 hours) one (CARDINAL).
Yes, above, God by using the cardinal form of the number ‘one’ is indicating that this day, of 24 hours, was a single complete day, equivalent to solar days which would begin on day fourth. For all six days have the same phrase of the evening and the morning. The evening of this day one was the earliest beginning of time. Time never existed before this evening of day one. It was an evening unique unto itself and it has no comparison. It began simultaneously with this event, the greatest miracle, the creation of space and matter, with the infusion of energy:
Genesis 1:1 (NASB20) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Yes, at the beginning of the creation is where time began.
Next, we consider God’s counting of the next day, following day one:
Genesis 1:8 (YLT) And God calleth to the expanse ‘Heavens;’ and there is an evening, and there is a morning – day second (ORDINAL).
God used an ordinal number, not a cardinal number as He did in day one. God is therefore revealing that He had begun to count off a series of consecutive days, each of 24 hour duration and this was day second in the series. Now for the rest of the series of days, from day third to day the sixth, they are all ordinal numbers showing that God is still counting His series of days:
Genesis 1:13 (YLT) and there is an evening, and there is a morning – day third (ORDINAL).
Genesis 1:19 (YLT) and there is an evening, and there is a morning – day fourth (ORDINAL).
Genesis 1:23 (YLT) and there is an evening, and there is a morning – day fifth (ORDINAL).
Genesis 1:31 (YLT) And God seeth all that He hath done, and lo, very good; and there is an evening, and there is a morning – day the sixth (ORDINAL).
Well, day the sixth ended the work of creation at the very end of its daylight portion.”
Now St. Roymond, I am way from finished. Please read the earlier posts on cardinal and ordinal numbers in conjunction with this post. And if you have any questions then please let me know so I can attempt to clarify before moving on. Thanks,
Paul Aarons
Okay, St.Roymond, I will answer you as my Heavenly Father gives me downloads to give to you as His answers to your questions and comments.
So let’s go further down in the Epistle of Jude below where Cain is mentioned and you were not satisfied with that verse with Cain that it showed that Adam being the biological father of Cain was a historical person. But we read further down:
Jude 1:14 And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,
Yes, when we go to Genesis 5, we see indeed that Enoch was the seventh chronogenealogy from Adam. And Enoch was a historical person who lived on the planet Earth for 365 days. And now Jude brings the understanding that Enoch was a preacher of the Gospel and Jude shared some of what Enoch preached by the Holy Spirit who inspired Jude to write His Epistle and also inspired Enoch to preach. So if Enoch was a historical preacher then Adam, his forefather must have been historical also and the Bible shows Adam’s chronogenealogy after sin:
Genesis 5:3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:
Genesis 5:4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:
Genesis 5:5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
Adam lived all the individual days accumulating to 930 years being subject to physical death, evidenced by the phrase ‘and he died’. Which phrase too is used in connection with the chronogenealogies of all the other descendants of Adam listed in Genesis 5, who physically died for all the days of their lifespans were each lived in sin and subject to physical death:
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death….
I also have other downloads from my Heavenly Father for some of your other comments, but I must get going for now. Thanks because my Heavenly Father teaches me from your comments in this manner:
Deuteronomy 25:4 Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.
For I am the ox who gets to eat first out of those downloads and be spiritually blessed. No my Heavenly Father has not muzzled me 
.
And this technology used by the Biologos forum is getting me up to speed with the latest technology for I became outdated with technology since I ceased writing the detailed Biblical Calendar over a decade and a half ago. I love this new technology it would have saved me lots of time two decades ago😂. Thanks so very much to Biologos for having me here🙏.
On what grounds? Ancient scholars called them “divine days” because no one was there to measure them but God. That actually makes more sense than just assuming they were 24-hour days.
And grammatically, the cardinal form does not such thing – it merely indicated order.
That’s not in the text. In fact time likely began even before God commanded light to be – the Spirit meditating over the waters is something that happens in time.
Which aren’t the boundaries of a day but of night. In the Egyptian mythology/cosmology that the Hebrews would have been familiar with from the time in Egypt night was a manifestation of the chaos-darkness that threatened all existence, something the gods had to fight against every time the sun went down in order to preserve existence for another day. The use of the phrase here announces to the Hebrews that night is not something to be feared, not a threat at all because YHWH-Elohim made it (and it is therefore good).
Ordinal numbers do not mean that, they only mean that one comes later than the previous.
BTW, it should be translated, “a second day”; “day second” is lousy English. And while I’m commenting on translation, the middle of that translation is poor also; it should read “and there was evening, and there was morning” – or if you want to catch a better sense of the Hebrew, “and evening was, and morning was”, to catch the verbal sense.
I’ve been trying to clarify things for you. Your main claim about ordinal numbers is wrong: they do not indicate consecutive days, they only indicate the order of a set of day – thus “ordinal”. For a different example, consider a race with a hundred runners and someone telling how their team did: they could say “Joe was first, Tim was second, Bob was third, and Dan was last”, referring to their order in their team; in terms of the entire set of runners, Joe could have been eighth, Tim twelfth, Bob twentieth, and Dan forty-fifth, but when talking about just their team all those other runners don’t matter.
Grammatically there could be a billion days between day one and a second day and ten billion between a second day and a third day.
No – the phrase “and he died” means he died and that was the end of his days. And when the text says “All the days that Adam lived” it means all the days he was alive – there is no distinction made between days in the Garden and days after; that’s pure invention.
That’s contrary to the grammar. It doesn’t say or even suggest they “physically died for all the says of their lifespans”, it says they lived X years, and they died, died being the opposite of “lived”.
You must have a different Heavenly Father, because you keep saying things that are contrary to the Hebrew text and Jesus’ Heavenly Father wouldn’t tell you things that are contrary to what the Holy Spirit inspired.
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