The Beginning & Creation (6,000+ years ago)
by Jeff Pohlman
© 2005
Much research, discussion and arguing has gone on over the origins of the earth and its species of living creatures, as well as the universe itself, even before the anthropological theory of evolution was postured by Charles Darwin's theory, On The Origin Of Species, in 1859. In fact, many "scholars" have since forgotten the hotly debated writings of earlier Greek, Roman, Asian, Germanic, Norse, Celtic, Anglican and Pan-American-Continental Indian civilizations. Now days, all debate seems to be distilled down to a finely focused debate around evolution versus creation.
WHICH SPECIES?
As far as the creation situation is concerned, we are of the bent that says that we are not descended from a different species, whether slime, amoeba, fish or monkeys and gorillas. Canine's beget canines, felines beget felines, bovines beget bovines, arachnids beget arachnids, and so on. Humans beget humans. Even though anthropologists arbitrarily and mistakenly place humans within the "highest" order of what they call "animals," there is NO evidence anywhere that successfully suggests that any species has created outside of it's genus species, as in an ape, gorilla, monkey or lemur producing a homosapiens human. If it were possible, we would see tell tale evidence trails all through fossil records. We don't. Not one shred. It is a great imaginative story, it is not substantiated by truth - anywhere. Some people jokingly say that if you want to believe that you personally did descend from an ape-like creature that clearly has no cranial brain capacity like the rest of us humans do, that's your business, but leave the rest us out of that lineage.
Further, while it is clear that humans are not plants, it is also clear that humans are not animals. That may be tough for you to think about, but that is what it looks like Biblically. Why? Because humans are the only part of God's creation that is given the capacity to be in His likeness (sometimes translated as in His image), that being where we are comprised of spirit, soul and body, with a spirit-relational tie that is most unique. All of the rest of creation is some other combination, but never all three in one, like humans.
There is even further confirmation in that we have capacity to know Jesus in the deepest spiritual face to face flow of relationship (nothing sexual about it - which must be stated - given our hyper weird society these days and the bent they have for heretical pagan sexual practices). Further, humans know each other in the Biblical sense of a face-to-face scenario (when married in God's way of doing things), and no other created item has that capacity, because all they have is an ever-so-slight physical union - for procreation reasons alone, with no face-to-face scenarios made possible.
If this puzzles you, just look deeply into the fact that there is no other created being that has eyes that can be read as body-and-spirit-language communication, like a human's eyes can be, especially in the fact that humans have whites to their eyes, and no other created being does. How the eyes move and react, as a reading of what is going on in the spirit of a human, is a most fascinating situation, and never found in any of the rest of creation.
Humans are unique. The stamp of God's desire for relationship, a capacity we are all thankful for.
TIME ITSELF
The Hebrew calendar is said to have started with creation, 3,760 years before Jesus was born. The new year (Yom Kippur) starts in the season we know as autumn, as opposed to the Gregorian Calendar's mid winter new year, in what we know as January. The twelve months of the lunar Hebrew calendar are Tishri, Heshvan, Kislev, Tebet, Shebat, Adar, Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Ab, and Elul.
The first Egyptian calendar was solar based, with twelve months of thirty days each, and a bonus week of five days added at the end of every year. Since it did not account for an extra quarter of a day each year, it slowly found itself in error, to the point that when Jesus was born, the earliest Egyptian dates appear to be somewhere around 4,236 years earlier.
The earliest pagan Greeks are known to have had a ten-month calendar. The Romans followed suit with the first ruler of Rome (who else? Romulus!) introducing his lunar-based version, just 738 years before Christ was born. Romulus' Romans used a ten-month calendar consisting of 304 days, totally ignoring sixty-some days that fell in mid-winter. They would add a short month at the end of twenty-two or twenty-three days every other year, to try to keep up with the solar calendar.
So, the keeping of time seemed to stop in the winter for the Greeks and the Romans, with the new year starting up in the month of Martius (March), followed by Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December (obviously the last six are derivatives of the Latin/ Greek root words for the numbers five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten).
An observer must not be surprised and keep in mind that outside of the Hebrews, we are talking about predominantly pagan people groups above. The season changes are seen from a purely pagan view in the rituals they celebrate. March 21st is approximately the beginning of spring, long celebrated as The Feast Of Ishtar, a holiday of huge debaucherous sexual appeal within paganism (if Ishtar and Easter sound eerily alike to you, you are correct - and your further study of Ishtar fertility celebrations, pagan idols [the Hebrew word for idol means sexual logs or poles], church steeples, and so forth will make your spiritual skin crawl). They were not oblivious to the procreation restrictions of winter (a season of sexual deadness to them), and were glad to be about romping about in the spring once again. This should surprise no one, and it is still seen in paganism, widely know today as wicca/ wiccan or satanic white and black witch worship practices. For the curious in the twenty-first century, they have been exposed to this, in a seemingly innocent manner, in the Harry Potter books, which are nothing but admitted pagan witchcraft rewritten to make money and to dupe the general public into thinking satan's ways are fun, good and nice. In the Greco-Roman calendar that started slightly before the first celebration and ended slightly after the last celebration (on the twenty-first day of each corresponding month), they were glad to see the dawning of spring and sad to watch the passing of the year as they entered into the foreboding winter.
At some point, one of the Roman kings wanted to capitalize on the seemingly lost time, and he added two more months at the end of winter, Januarius and Februarius, rounding out a twelve-month calendar, so public officials could stay longer in office and so they could collect more taxes during two more formal months.
Forty Six years before Jesus was born physically in His earthly body, the infamous Julius Caesar commissioned his astronomer Sosigenes to try to make improvements on the calendar's slight foibles that educated men knew existed, and thus you have probably heard of the Julian Calendar. Remember this, the Hebrew calendar had been around as one of the oldest with truly recorded history, and it still is in use today. Basically, the order came down from Julius to ignore the lunar cycles (which do exist as part of the Hebraic calendar), and a "new" twelve month calendar was adopted. His vanity got the better of him and he had the month of Quintilis renamed after himself, Julius (now our July). So as not to offend, the Emperor Augustus took the month of Sextilis and thus we now have the month of August. They also played some games with the numbers of days in a month, so they both could have the most, 31. I suppose when people today are paying to have stars in the sky named after themselves, this should not surprise anyone, when Roman kings wanted to show off with something as important as a calendar.
By 1580, the solar, lunar and equinox cycles were so out of whack according to the Julian calendar, that spring was starting on March 11th, when in fact it started ten days later. Pope Gregory XIII took this under his advisement and in 1582, on October 5th, miraculously he waved his papal wand and made it October 15th. He made other official adjustments regarding extra-day additions, accomplished in February on prescribed years, and all is now well in the calendar world (there are other tiny problems, like the solar year gradually growing shorter [remember this - the sun is cooling down too], but we're not going there) J
Different nations adopted the Gregorian calendar at widely different times and it even causes problems in our "modern" way of thinking. Examples include most Germanic states not changing from Julian (old-style or "o.s.") to Gregorian (new-style or n.s.) until after 1700, Great Britain in 1752, Russia in 1918, and Turkey (eastern-most Europe) in 1928. You might wonder why this causes confusion. Well, George Washington was actually born on February 11, 1732 o.s. However, we in the United States celebrate his birthday as February 22nd n.s.
There is yet other calendar argument where historicity-people have discovered origins of people such as Christopher Columbus, quite possibly a Hebrew, where being threatened with execution due to anti-Semitic edicts in Spain, he set sail from a sympathetic Portugal on the eve of a potential wholesale execution of the Jews in Spain, with as many of the fellow Jews he could round up, to set sail for a "New World." The truth of this carefully hidden forced-exile of Jews, yet again in history, stems to an argument over a silly riddle where "Americans" repeat the rhyming phrase "In 1492, Columbus Sailed The Ocean Blue," where in actuality, the Hebrew's ship and sailing logs are dated with the Hebraic 5252, and THAT has significance to a God-fearing Hebrew.
Now that you've had a dizzying history lesson on calendars, you might be able to remember this detail...
In the Gregorian calendar year of 1997, the Hebrew calendar was at 5757. The Gregorian calendar now changes to a new year at the beginning of January instead of March, and using the Gregorian calendar as a reference point, the Hebrew calendar changes to a new year somewhere in September or October (again, we're not experts on Hebrew calendars).
This accounting gives you a feel for the numbering of years, imperfect as it is within God's eternal universe, where some scholars think that the Biblical accounts written about Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, et al, having been meticulously handed down through oral and written tradition, were at some point formalized and begun in writing with someone like Moses. The chronicle of earth-time had begun somewhere in there, and you can see that the Hebrew calendar was turning to 5760 in October of 1999, just before the Gregorian calendar turned to 2000 a few months later. The simple math of it is that you should add 3,760 years 3 months to a Gregorian date, to ascertain an approximate Hebraic date. Wow, you waded that far, just to see that little fact J
SO WHAT PROBLEMS ARE THERE?
Using that calendar discussion as a springboard, we have a rough guess that the description of the creation of earth as we know it is something of a 6,000-year-old event. The guesses of modern anthropology that utilize flawed carbon dating techniques and project earth ages in millions or billions of years, are way-wrong, tilted imaginations. The consistency of the universe and our galaxy show us that solar systems and the stars themselves are formed and then go through a cooling-off process, eventually even burning out. Never the other way around (thus the global warming adherents are way off - but I digress). Our sun and solar system are far too young to substantiate millions and billions of year-old dating projections. Some scientists have admitted that there may be a scenario where we only have another 300 to 400 years (not even a thousand) left before the earth will be so cold that it will be uninhabitable by humans, and we'll freeze, because the sun is cooling off, evidenced by its spitting out more and more solar flares as it gives up it's so-called life. In this we are not experts either, but just observers.
The problems that are under scrutiny, and of particular interest to us, are accounts of Biblical stories of such things as The Great Flood, and a few other stories or prophecies like the leveling and sinking of Mediterranean twin cities Tyre and Sidon, the destruction of sister cities Sodom and Gomorrah, the leveling of sister cities Babylon and Ninevah by flood waters (while well-inland and surrounded by insurmountable city walls). The teaching of God's Creation in public schools came under such heavy attack that is was eventually dismissed out of hand, and by the 1990s it was wholesale laughed at, where Darwinian evolution was ASSUMED to be the only true way of creation (where even the alternative Big Bang theory is just a piece of mild entertainment now). In the 1990s, several Biblical-Creationist scientists rose up and today we have a great body of research and yet another branch of apologetics, showing the firm evidence of God's creation as God's creation - not an accident. While Darwinian evolutionists of every bent can be found on almost all college campuses, and emanating from the halls of The National Geographic Society, and The Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, you have to look a little more carefully to find creationists, under labels such as The Institute For Creation Research, Creation Foundation, the Creation Science Institute, and so on. Momentum is being gained in the public arena that proclaims and proposes that the creation account be at a minimum, presented, letting the observer make his or her own conclusions once level amounts of evidence are "impartially" allowed to be presented.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The drop back and punt approach simply says to exercise faith in what the Bible says. Some people are a bit more scrappy than that, and either want to be more argumentative, or do research to satisfy their own curiosities. Whatever the approach, one eventually comes to a point of seeing that it takes much much MORE faith to believe the absolutely threadbare evidence presented by Darwinian anthropologists and their versions of evolution, than it does to simply believe the Bible to be the truth it is, and the account that it holds for God's creating everything.
For some, the name calling will go on incessantly. For others, the stubborn adherence to one side or the other will be absolutely exasperating. By and large, we believe that an individual CAN research and discover for himself/ herself, and come to mature conclusions. Some deep thinking and puzzling are sure to be in order, mostly because we are finite beings in our bodies, trying to consider the infinite God, Creator of the universe (for those who don't believe there is God, hopelessness can run really deep here). Much like our position on other research skills, if one is sincere and truly petitions the Creator of the universe for His answers, He will give them, and strike a chord within the spirit of the person, so much so that faith becomes actions. That requires a trust in the spontaneity of His Holy Spirit, and faith to believe that He can and will handle the differences between us.
This area truly is an exciting one, and when one becomes a student, trying to decipher what is here as evidence, and to come up with some conclusion about what happened, it's like solving a great mystery novel. The evidence is truly gigantic. The outcome is exciting, when you begin to see the complexity and the consistency. Many a scientist eventually comes to the realization that there truly is an unseen hand holding it all together, a loving Creator who does keep chaos from happening.
© 2005 Permission to copy or reprint granted only if full version is quoted and proper notation of authorship recognition is given.
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