The debate among Christians about the age of the earth is an ongoing one. You got the intransigent young earth creationists (YEC) like me who can feel the the romance of a juvenile earth flowering up between their toes. Then there are the old earth creationists (OEC) who walk that very smudgy line of a 4 billion year old planet with all the asterisks marking the Bible verses where mental gymnastics need be applied.
As a friend of the sciences, I can empathize with the OEC guys. Vegetation being a day older than the Sun which makes it grow warrants puzzlement. As does counting off the days prior of creation prior to the creation of the Sun by which we count days. All of these are good and necessary questions and ones I won’t jump into today.
But we have to deal with the fact that Jesus and other Biblical writers took a young earth for granted. To say they only did so because they interpreted the past through the best available lens, and that there was a lack of competing theories, is to engage in the same kind of asterisk spangling I mentioned above.
If we approach the Bible this way, we casts shadows on the truths that the Bible ties to those ancient events. Vital concepts have been tethered to history that happened on the back of a young earth, and when we explain away the history, the concept attached to it wither vanishes or becomes a rootless metaphor.
Jesus takes it as a matter of course that Adam and Eve were actual people created by God with intention, not some arbitrary genetic ancestor selected when the backbone of our humanoid precursor was erect enough to be considered a man. He used the actual union of our historic first parents to teach the vital concept about the permanence and boundaries of marriage (Matthew 19:3-6), and one that guides us in real time when marriage gets tough.
Jesus wasn’t trying to pull some solid truth from a mythical hat, he was revealing the origin of a concept that is at play in the present because it really happened that way. God did it that way so that the truth spoken by Jesus could be rooted in reality.
The author of Hebrews also illustrates an important truth by illuminating it’s origin in the certain past, and this is the inheritance of rest we enter into through Christ rooted deep in the the historic six-day creation.
Biblical scholars are still unsure who exactly wrote the book of Hebrews. Some site Paul, others Apollos. I am in the Apollos camp, the first century Alexandrian Christian noted for having an eloquent quill (Acts 18:24-26). For expediency’s sake, I am going to assume it is Apollos.
Let me toss some verses onto the workbench before that I will be working with:
Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened
Hebrews 4:1-2, ESV
For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.
Hebrews 4:4 ESV
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
Hebrews 4:8-11 ESV
Apollos is admonishing the Hebrew Christians to enter into a rest, and they are to enter this rest through faith. What kind of rest is this? It is the same kind of repose as God took when he finished His six days of creation.
God’s rest was not the repose that recruits exhausted strength, but the cessation of work because the work was finished; there was nothing left undone. In addition to the completed work, is the satisfaction of sitting back and watching all the whirring parts spinning in harmony as purposed. Everything is going as intended.
Apollos warns the Hebrews, and by extension us, to strive to enter into the same kind of rest that God enjoyed. We do this by mixing the message of salvation with faith in Jesus Christ. Through faith we enter into the rest of completed works. These works were the necessary acts which Jesus Christ accomplished and in which we partake through faith.
There is a kicking up of the feet of a man who is resting because Christ completed the necessary work. The law is fulfilled, the sin swallowed, the wrath extinguished in blood; there is nothing left undone. This repose is the harmonious reconciliation of our relationship with the Creator restored. Everything is back in order. We are in a rest that requires the easy work of faith, without the wear and tear of the law.
Now there are all sorts of juicy truths in these passages sure to provide some spiritual yummies, but the point I want to draw here is that the rest we are to experience in the completion of our salvation through Christ is of the same kind that God experienced after an actual work completed in history.
Apollos isn’t just scouring the scriptures for some random event that can prove his point, reading into the Genesis text what he wants to be there; the purpose of the six day creation is so that through it we can understand the rest we share with God. Our rest in Christ is as real as His salvific work, just as God’s rest was as real as the young earth under your feet.
When we give away the historicity of the literal creation week, we give away the purpose of the Sabbath, which is to say, we explain away the purposive rest God intends for us to have. Just as Jesus’s proscription of divorce hinges on the reality of a historic Adam and Eve wedded in holy matrimony, so the reality of our rest is explained through the literal creation week. If the week goes, the rest goes with it.
What kind of completion do we get through an OEC understanding? There is no completion, only an ever evolving work in progress; an old and restless work in perpetuity.
I am not tying an OEC to salvation here, not at all. But we do miss out on the ability to understand and partake in that same rest as our Father, and the jolly repose that comes with kicking the feet back on the ottoman after a work completed to perfection, which we get to do through faith in Christ’s completed work.
Thought Butter 