Chronology Of Creation —

timeline

There is no special understanding of Scripture required in order to see that God created the world about 4000 years before the birth of Christ. It takes some research, but the accumulation of years is clearly accessible to anyone who believes the Bible is true. As for the nuances and details, the more you study the Bible, and what God is clearly meaning for us to understand when we read the Bible, the chronology just becomes even more clear.

There are some people who like to criticize the Bible and would like to confuse you into thinking that there are several Bible passages that cast doubt on the reliability of such a calculation. They are also the same people who do not believe we can trust God to give us His Word. They believe it has been lost, if we ever had it in the first place.

You can use the genealogies in Genesis to add up the time to the flood and beyond to Jacob, also known as Israel. There is no concern if someone thinks that these generations are not father to son, since the age of ancestor is given at the time of the birth of the next one in the line. We are adding up several generations, and the age given could be close after a birthday or close to the next birthday, so there could be an accumulation of error. This error would be far less than a century. Also, if you are familiar with statistics, you will know that the more numbers we have in the calculation, the less likely there will be a deviation from the average in the total. So, if you just add a half year to each one, the total will be extremely close to the actual historical amount.

Then we know the age of Jacob when he entered Egypt. We know they left exactly 430 years later. We are then told the time from the Exodus to the time when Solomon started building the temple in the fourth year of his reign. That adds another 400 years. We are then told the length of the reigns of each king. This length is not given from start to finish, but the number of calendar years that they started during their reign. So, there is no accumulation of error in this total. Not only that, but there were two kingdoms in parallel, so we have the lists from each that we can use to correlate an even more accurate accounting. Then we have the 70 year captivity. The final number to add to the calculation is the 483 and half years from the end of the captivity to the crucifixion of Christ. This number is both in the prophecy from Daniel and in the historical records. As you can see, there is no room for any significant quantities of time to be inserted anywhere.

Some, out of desperation, try to add deep time in between the first verse and the second verse of the Bible. This called the gap theory. They come up with some really creative fiction to put into this gap as well. This idea plainly contradicts the clear statements in Genesis chapters one and two. God started creating and did not rest one day until the seventh day from when He started. I have read the best explanations attempting to defend the gap theory biblically and they fail. Really, their only excuse is that they have bought into the the so-called scientific (atheistic) descriptions of history and they are trying to find some place to fit the billions of years into the Bible.

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