Billions of Years and the Biblical Timeline

Time—is that elusive quality we all experience and to which Einstein tried to explain mathematically. Using the biblical procedure of relying on the Bible as the true foundation of our search for truth, we conclude that we should never give scientific opinions a position of superior authority over God’s inerrant Word. Yet, there are professed Christians who would for example say, “Since science tells us the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the universe even older, so the creation account in the Book of Genesis must be taken as symbolic, figurative, allegorical or poetic. The main thing to know is that God created.”

We should note first of all that science tells us nothing. Science and its fallible and changeable discoveries change continually. It is those who work in the fields of science that speak for it according to their own interpretations. This is what I mean by saying that “science tells us nothing.” Science has no voice of its own except those who give it a voice and a vocabulary according to their own very often biased interpretations. On the other hand, Christians have a true source of information about the history of this world which has been given to us by the One who was there from the beginning. Not only at the beginning of the creation of the world as we know and experience it, but who is the eternal uncaused Cause and living God from all eternity past.

The Book of Genesis is not Poetry. There are no Hebrew poetic parallelisms as is common to books like the Psalms, Job, and Proverbs. Genesis is history plain and simple. It is, to say the least, disingenuous and I believe dangerous for professed Christians to misidentify Genesis as poetic and symbolic when Jesus clearly supported it as real history. For example, Jesus said, 

“But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6).

“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?” And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself (Luke 24:25-27). 

Jesus answered and said to them, “Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. But concerning the dead, that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’” (Mark 12:24-26).

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14).

Jesus is the One through whom God created all things. He is God as the second person of the trinity. John 1:2-4 records, “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” Jesus put His stamp of approval on the authenticity of the Old Testament scriptures. He believed in the writings of Moses and the Prophets. He believed that Genesis was recording real history when it refers to the creation of Adam and Eve during that first week of creation. He believed in the account of Moses and the raising of the serpent on a pole for healing as a real historical event.

Again, using the Scriptures instead of fallible science ideas and proposals, we would have to conclude that at a certain point in the continuum of eternal time God started things off as recorded in Genesis 1:1. The Bible indicates this creation event to be approximately 6,000 years ago. Let it be said that 6,000 years is a long, long time, and only seems short because of the false narrative of millions of years proposed by evolutionary thinking. Such more reliable biblical information is gained from the genealogical records so meticulously listed in the Old Testament. All the names listed in these lists were real people, all the way back to Adam. For example, Jude 14 refers to Enoch as “the seventh from Adam.” And at the end of Luke’s extensive genealogy of Jesus we read, “…the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Cainan, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God” Luke3:37,38).

How do we fit approximately 6,000 years into the timescale of eternity? It is not too difficult as long as we don’t have unsubstantiated and ethereal ideas about the quality of time itself. I have been reading a book titled Christ and Time: The Primitive [early] Christian Conception of Time and History, by German theologian Dr. Oscar Cullmann. I mention this not because I am looking to the author as an unquestionable authority, but because his proposal about understanding time seems to correlate with Scripture. To be brief, I understand from Dr. Cullmann that all time can be understood as linear and sequential. He does not believe that time as we now experience it on earth began just with the event of Genesis 1:1, but that time stretches back to what we could term eternity past.

In other words, our experience in this world beginning from Genesis 1:1 and continuing on is an insertion into God’s eternal timeline. Putting it simply, eternity stretches back forever as eternity past, then God picked a time on the linear timeline of eternity to begin at Genesis 1:1, then this period of created reality continues in the present until Jesus returns and brings in the new heavens and new earth, and future eternity will continue forever.

Scriptural support for the concept of time having always been linear and sequential can be seen clearly in the Book of Revelation which is better named “The Revelation of Jesus Christ.” Over eighty times as we read Revelation we notice the words, then, when, after these things, and similar references to time referring to events that are obviously linear and sequential— happening in a line of time.

John’s vision in Revelation takes place in the spiritual heavenly realm. Yet time is referred to as the same as we experience on earth. For example, Revelation 8:1 says, “When He opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” Revelation 20:7 refers to “When the thousand years are ended.” And Revelation 22:2 refers to, “…the tree of life, which bore twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.”

What is God’s purpose in creating these 6,000 years which all of us individually have the privilege of experiencing briefly during our short lifetimes? I believe the Bible teaches us that His purpose is to enjoy a people, the bride of Christ, who have overcome the world, the flesh and the devil, and who love Him for who He is, and have become holy like Him by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. Paul sums it up: “But we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

May none of us ever hear those terrifying words from the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, “I do not know you” (Matthew 25:12). How tragic to believe we are ready for eternity when we are not! Let’s be ready.