A Different Look at Genesis
I thought it would be interesting to write about this instead of end-times for a change. Some of you may have read bits and pieces of my thoughts on this but I thought it was time I put them altogether into one comprehensive piece.I am a creationist but I'm also not a "young-earther". Sometimes we have to look at what the bible doesn't say on an issue to grasp a larger truth. Our God is eternal so could this rock we call earth have been around for a billion years or so before God decided to redesign it? Sure, I can live with that. If a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day to God, could creation have taken 7000 years? I'm open to that possibility as well. Today, however, I want to focus on what happened after God created Adam.
For example, young-earthers want to believe that when God created Adam, after His day of rest, He created Eve and they woke up the next morning and went straight to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, the bible doesn't say that!
We don’t know how long Adam was in the garden alone before God made Eve. It could have been hundreds of years or more. We also don’t know how long the both lived in the garden before the fall. I believe it's possible they could have lived thousands of years in the garden because they were created as eternal beings with access to the Tree of Life. In fact, before sin entered into the world everything was eternal because there was no death. Everything that God created was very good! There was no rot and decay among the plant life. From Gen. 1:29-30 it can be assumed that there were no meat eaters and everything that ate had a vegetarian type diet.
God told everything He created to be fruitful and multiply and I believe that was meant for Adam and Eve as well. Here are a couple of things you may not have considered before. One is that as perfect human beings, they most likely had use of 100% of their brain, whereas science tells us that presently we only use about 10% of our brain. Imagine their intelligence! Sometimes they are pictured as doe-eyed innocents lost in a majestic garden and other times they’re pictured as little more than ignorant cave people but I believe both of those pictures vastly under estimate the perfection of God’s creation.
Here is another thing that is never spoken of. We know that Eve had children before the fall because as part of their judgment in Gen. 3:16, God changed the parameters of child birth. If she had never had children how would she know the difference? I think if we reverse engineer this verse we can assume that prior to the fall childbirth was virtually painless and the length of pregnancy was much shorter. I believe it is very possible that they had hundreds or thousands of children before the fall! The biblical record of childbirth just starts after the fall, when death entered into the equation and "time" began to matter.
Recognizing this possibility solves three of the mysteries that surround the stories in Genesis. The first is that this would explain the “others" that Cain was concerned about (Gen. 4:14). The second would be the identity of the “sons of God” that mated with the daughters of men in Gen. 6:4. The third would be where the “giants” came from that are also found in vs. 4.
Is it possible that in God’s mind He separated the children of Adam and Eve into two groups? Perhaps the ones conceived before the fall which were eternal and had no prior knowledge of evil He considered “children of God” and those conceived after the fall would be considered the “children of men” because they lost access to the Tree of Life and were no longer His children but the children, so to speak, of the Evil One now that they had received the basic sin nature that we all would inherit.
Speaking to that issue, I’m not a scientist but it’s my opinion that both of those trees had genetic/dna consequences. The Tree of Life extended their lives and added to their aspect as eternal beings, which was one of the aspects of the likeness of God in which they were created. From their partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the only way it made them more like God was the newly acquired knowledge and awareness of evil. That knowledge, I believe, was also inherently passed down through the generations via our gene pool passed down through the man’s seed. That is why God had to use His seed and a virgin so Jesus could be born w/o that basic sin nature. It was the only way He had a chance to live a sinless life and thus become the pure and spotless Lamb that was sacrificed for our sakes.
This also explains why they were so long-lived before the flood. It took time for the eternal aspect of their DNA to degrade down to the point where our life span had decreased to 120 years or less.
I also believe the antediluvian civilization because of the sons of God, was far more advanced then we give them credit for and thankfully most of that knowledge was lost in the flood. As we were created in Their image we most likely received the desire to explore and create as well. Imagine the things we could come up with if we had access to 100% of our brain. I believe they excelled at agriculture and animal husbandry and as herbalists and many other sciences that we lost because of the flood.
When evil came upon the earth it wouldn’t surprise me if their knowledge took a darker turn towards genetic manipulation and plant based chemistry. Perhaps they are the ones that created the ancient carnivores like T-Rexes and such and it’s possible that they mixed human and animal DNA to come up with the creatures from Greek Mythology as well, whose stories were passed down from the sons of Noah which were added to or changed as what happens when tales are passed down through the generations. Let’s not forget the possibility of plant-based chemical enhancements and DNA manipulation that could create the “giants” and “men of renown” also from Gen. 6:4.
I’m not declaring everything in this article to be the truth but as seekers of the truth shouldn’t we consider all the possibilities that are out there? These are just some of the thoughts I’ve pondered over the years on this, to me, very interesting topic. I do have one question for those who have a leaning towards evolution. What would the “half-life” be of a creature with either eternal or partial eternal DNA? It wouldn’t surprise me if it registered a couple hundred million years or more!