Time is one of God's creations. In fact the first thing God created was time. "In the beginning...." The Creator is not defined by His Creation, rather the Creation is defined by the Creator.
He defined a time interval for "day" for His Creation before He even created the sun, moon, and stars. He defines the movement of the heavenly bodies, because He is Lord over all.
He created these heavenly bodies in part to mark the advance of defined time intervals for us. Genesis 1 states as much.
Biblical scholars who read with a spirit of intellectual honesty look at a whole passage and they do so in its context. Too often those who experience difficulty with this portion of Scripture fail to quote the rest of the passage that says “… and a thousand years as a day.”
As Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis aptly discusses:
“If people use Scripture to try to justify that the days of creation are long periods of time, they usually quote passages such as 2 Peter 3:8, “. . . one day is with the Lord as a thousand years . . .“. Because of this, they think the days could be a thousand years, or perhaps even millions of years. However, if you look at the rest of the verse, it says, “. . . and a thousand years as one day“. This cancels out their argument! The context of this passage concerns the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. This particular verse is telling people that with God, waiting a day is like waiting a thousand years, and waiting a thousand years is like waiting a day because God is outside of time—He is not limited by natural processes and time. This has absolutely nothing to do with defining the days of creation. Besides, the word “day” already exists and has been defined, which is why in 2 Peter it can be compared to a thousand years. There is no reference in this passage to the days of creation.”
Back to my point about the definition of days:
If the time frame for “day” in Genesis was different than 24 hours - say 1000 years or even 1 million years, explain how it is that flowers are created on day 3, the sun presumably needed to allow them to photosynthesize their life-maintaining energy is not created until a million years later on day 4, humming birds needed to pollenate some flowers don’t show up until yet another million years later on day 5, and the insects and bats needed to pollenate still other flowers in order to reproduce don’t show up until another million years later on Day 6!
It wouldn’t matter if you speculated 1 year per day or 1000 years per day, you’d have no flowering foliage in any case!
FReegards!
