Creation Concepts

Up to this point in my life, I've always just taken creation for a literal account of 7, 24 hour days. However, I've had opportunity enough to be exposed to ideas ranging from evolution and the big bang theory to the gap theory and theistic evolution. I still hold to my first beliefs for three main reasons.

First of all, my God is the God of the impossible. Second, most of the time God says what He means in His Word. Outside of some poetic, symbolic, or prophetic passages, He means what He says literally. Third, does it REALLY matter. Whether God made the world in 7 literal days or 7,000 years, each depicted as a day; He still made it, He's still all-powerful, and He still did an incredible job!

VERBS:
In Genesis 1 and 2, there are several verbs that tell us HOW God created. "In the beginning, God . . ."
1)made (Gen 1:7, 16, 25, 26)
2)said (Gen 1:3)
3)divided (Gen 1:4)
4)called/named (1:5)
5)created (1:21)
6)formed (2:7,19)
7)planted (2:8, Eden)

These verbs imply a miraculous creator, an involved craftsman, and a busy gardener. Again, I am still not to the point of changing my mind about LONG days of creation (Day-Age Creationism), but usually gardening, crafting, and creating are not rushed processes. I do NOT; however believe their was any evolving going on, primarily for this reason. God's command to all living things was that they bring forth after their kind (Gen 1:24). It's a pretty long stretch (theistic evolution) to say that God created early life and it metamorphosed into all other forms of life, if God commanded that early life to bring forth after its own kind. Amebas having amebas having amebas having lions, and tigers, and bears? That idea just doesn't work at all!

I want to comment on a couple of words I noticed that might "support" Day-Age Creationism (the idea that each day of creation may have been thousand or millions of years). Both words occur in Genesis 2:4 which says, "These are the GENERATIONS of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the DAY that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Though I don't think Christians need to find a way for evolutionary process to take place (which was the major thrust behind the idea), I think given the wording here, it's not impossible. Again, my God is the God of the impossible; my God is usually literal; and does it really matter? In later scriptures, when God speaks of generations of men, he means generations as laid out over many natural years. Also, II Peter 3:8 says, "But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." I don't think we can entirely rule out that God took His time to create, not because stuff needed time to evolve, but because God was enjoying His work!