How many Bible reading programs have stumbled at 1 Chronicles? We come through Genesis with the creation, the flood, the Patriarchs and we get into Exodus with Moses leading the people out of Egypt through the trek in the wilderness of Sinai. We get a little slow in Leviticus with its seemingly-endless levitical instructions, but we push on through Numbers and Deuteronomy and then to the conquest of Canaan in Joshua. We go through the history of the Judges, the heart-warming story of Ruth, followed by the history of Saul and David in Samuel and Kings. Then we hit the wall in Chronicles with its genealogies.
What are they there for? Padding? Hardly. They are important to the bona fides of Jesus – hence Matt.1 and Luke 3. They are important to the Jewish priesthood – cf. 2 Chron. 31:19 (hence problems with it even today). We are instructed to be careful with our use of them (cf.. 1 Tim. 1:4; Titus 3:9). What could this mean? There is not a problem with the legitimate use of genealogies, but using genealogies to pander to Jewish exclusive pride in the early church was a problem. So was the Gnostic use of fabricating genealogies.
What can we learn from Bible genealogies? The two prominent and conflicting world views also incorporate within them widely divergent views on the age of the earth. They don’t even come close! The Creationist view of a six-day creation week a few thousand years ago is about a million times shorter than the evolutionary view. That’s not a minor discrepancy is it? They are not slight variations on the same theme – they are poles apart – they are opposites!
Some are very anxious to reconcile the two world views, and to accomplish that some have suggested that the Bible is not a scientific book (true enough – however, it does speak about man’s scientific challenge – Gen. 1:28), and that we need to look to science for the answers. But since the Bible is the Word of God, whenever it speaks on any subject, whether History, Geography, Topography, Medicine, Ethics, Morality, or Science it is accurate in what it says.
Does the Bible address the question of the age of the earth? Yes it does. Some would suggest it doesn’t. For example John Clayton says Gen. 1:1 is an undated verse…God may have used eons of time to accomplish His objectives. Why say that? Because he wants to believe in an old earth. Why? because he believes in evolution. Now, do we need an old earth (by ‘old’ I mean millions of years)? No. God took just 6 days to make the universe and those 6 days could fit in anywhere! And to get from Adam to Christ doesn’t require millions of years either!
Don England said Inasmuch as Scripture does not state how old the earth is or how long life has existed on the earth, one is free to accept, if he wishes, the conclusions of science. Why do people want an earth millions of years old – because all are agreed, both evolutionists and creationists, evolution is impossible if the world is relatively young. Jack Sears wrote in 1969 that we must wait and see what Science comes up with on this question before we take the Bible at face value on this. Interestingly 14 years later in 1983 he debated Bert Thompson on the question of the age of the earth. He affirmed that the Bible allowed for an old age of the earth. Yet in the debate he still affirmed that we need to wait and see! As Thompson observed What these writers mean when they say we should wait and see or that we should reserve judgement is that those who believe in a young earth should wait and see or reserve judgement. In the meantime they will continue to advocate publicly their position than an ancient earth is wholly consistent with the Biblical record.
The fact of the matter is that some Christians are trying to sit on the fence, having a leg in both camps, either because they believe the ‘science’ on this score, or don’t want to be out of line with accepted public opinion. Paul warned Timothy about the oppositions of science, falsely so called. We ought not to be worried about being out of step with the scientific community because what community are we in step with anyway? With regard to drinking alcohol we’re wowsers, in regard to morality we’re puritanical, with regard to the times we’re old-fashioned and so on – why should we be worried about this area?
How does the Bible address the age of the earth? By genealogies! Obviously God did not use C14 or Potassium/Argon or tree rings because, not only being full of assumptions and totally unreliable except in relatively young ages, many of these methods would have meant nothing to those who penned the Bible. (Why aren’t dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible? – the word was only invented in the 1800’s!). Besides, how can you measure the age of something that was created out of nothing? You can’t. Take Adam for example:- looking at him you would find contradictory evidence- he’s a mature man and yet he is flawless. Take a tree for example – it looks years old because its mature and bearing fruit but it has no annual growth rings. God did something better – something factual, something that can be nailed down historically. Any generation of people can understand genealogies and ages – everyone understands mum and dad, grandma and granddad, the years denoted by summer and winter – regardless of the technology.
Take population figures for instance. If we take the standard formula for population increase and enter evolutionary figures into this with a conservative figure (for evolution) of one million years, the population of the earth would be 1X10 to the power of 5000. Now the whole universe could only contain 1X10 to the power of 100, which is only a small fraction of the number. We might postulate that many of them died in wars and famines and plagues and that’s all very well, but where are their remains? Why isn’t the dust of the earth infinitely thick?
Now, if we use a generation of 35 years, and be conservative with but three children per family (has to be more than two otherwise there is no growth) and everyone lives to 35 years of age on average, after 52 generations we would have 4.34 billion. Professor Edwin Thiele said, We know that God regards chronology as important, for he put so much of it into His Word. We find chronology not only in the historical books of the Bible, but also in the prophetic books, in the Gospels, and in the writings of Paul. Some say that not all genealogical records are complete (eg, that of Jesus in Matt.1) and therefore are of no value. What they are saying is that one could introduce a few million years between Adam and Abraham, say, and do no injustice to the Biblical record. But to have any value they must be substantially correct. Look at Genesis 5 and 11 – where are you going to introduce a few million years there and still make sense of them?!
What can we say? Because Israel didn’t live in a corner or a vacuum but her history is intertwined with other nations, certain dates have been established with great accuracy. A monument called The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser was found by Layard at Nimrod, south of Nineveh in the middle of the 1800’s. It is now in the Bristish Museum. It shows the Assyrian King, Shalmaneser, receiving tribute from various kings including Jehu, Son of Omri (a descendant, rather than a son). With this and other lists of the Assyrian records we can fix the death of Ahab to be 853-852 B.C. We can start working backwards through 1 Kings:
1 Kings 16:23 – Omri reigned for 12 years
16:25 – Zimri reigned for 7 days
16:8 – Elah reigned 2 years
15:33 – Baasha reigned 24 years
15:25 – Nadab reigned 2 years
1 Kings 14:20 – Jereboam reigned 22 years
11:42 – Solomon reigned 40years
If you do the maths you will see that the reign of Solomon was 971-931 B.C. According to 1 Kings 6:1, Moses led Israel out of Egypt 480 years before the fourth year of Solomon’s reign. So the date of the Exodus is 1446/1445 B.C. Add to this the 430 years mentioned in Ex.12:40 which is the time the Israelites spent in Egypt. So Jacob went into Egypt in 1876 B.C. Jacob told Pharoah in Gen. 47:9 that he was 130 years old and that would make the year of his birth, 2006 B.C. Isaac was 60 years old when Jacob was born (Gen. 25:26) and Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born (Gen. 21:5). So Abraham was born 2166 B.C. Now I won’t bore you with details or tax your arithmetic powers any longer, but two genealogies, in Gen. 5 and Gen. 11, record the genealogy from Adam to Abraham. It ends up that Creation was approximately 4175 B.C. Is there a margin for error in that? Yes, because we have used round numbers for the years. Not everybody dies on their birthday so there could average out a 6-month error with each generation. So when John Lightfoot, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University in the 17th century said that Creation occurred the week of October 18-24, 4004 B.C., and that Adam, and Eve were created on October 23 at 9.00 a.m., forty fifth meridian time, he overstated the case and gave opportunity for skeptics to lampoon attempts to date the earth. However, while the Bible does not give us the very date of the Creation, we do know of a certainty that it is but thousands, not millions, of years of age.
But we need to ask the question, Why do we need an old earth? The answer is We don’t!– unless we are trying to harmonize evolutionary theory with Creational fact. Since when do evolutionary dating methods take precedence over God’s Word? Why did God regard it important that we know the age of the earth? So we could know of a certainty that we are created in His image, there being no time for any evolutionary process.