Monday, September 24, 2012

Insertion into the Solar System – Part III – The Length of God’s Day


Continuing from the last post, clearly the temporal existence of the earth was to last a full week of the Lord's time, to be finished by the "great and last day," a millennium or one thousand years of man's time. In a modern-day revelation the Lord said:
"God made the world in six days, and on the seventh day he finished his work, and sanctified it...in the beginning of the seventh thousand years, will the Lord sanctify the earth."


These straight-forward and explicit statements leave very little uncertainty and permit little individual interpretation.  For those who believe literally in the scriptures, we are in the evening of the thirteenth "day" after the morning of the first "day" of creation.  Or stated differently, it took six thousand of our years to form the earth, some portion of a seventh day, the day of rest following creation, and then another six thousand years of earth life. In all, the earth has existed for approximately thirteen thousand years.
While Moses used a word in Genesis meaning a period of time, the word he used in the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, as translated by Joseph Smith, is rendered day. In Abraham's writing, again as translated by Joseph Smith, the word he uses to describe the creative process is time. Careful study, then, of the scriptural meanings of the two terms indicates that a creative time is synonymous with a creative day.
Now if this creative day was different than the living day as referred to in the scriptures—that is, one of God's days is one thousand years to us—we have no indication.  Certainly, the seven days of earth life, as indicated in the previous post in the Doctrine and Covenants, is synonymous with seven thousand years, or one thousand years for each day. If this living day is the same as the creative day, then it would appear that the earth was created in six days of the Lord's time, or six thousand years of our time.
Certainly, earth life will be completed somewhere near the end of the sixth thousand years since Adam's fall. And assuming we are living toward the end of that sixth thousand year period, then we are indeed living in the Saturday Night of time as it relates to this world. 
The seventh day, or seventh thousand years, then, will be the millennium. This would suggest, from the scriptures at least, that a day is equal to a thousand years and it has been six thousand years since Adam's fall. But what about the period of time that it took to organize the earth and the heaven?
Adam's Time in the Garden of Eden:  What we do not know, of course, is how long Adam and Eve spent in the Garden of Eden.  We can surmise that they were in the garden during the seventh day of the Lord's rest, which might imply a thousand years.  A careful reading of the Doctrine and Covenants, particularly section 77, would indicate that Adam fell within the "day of the Lord" in which he was placed in the garden.  Thus, our first parents might have been given a thousand years to be in the garden, but that period of time was cut short by the acts that led to the Fall. In any event, this period of time is not indicated in the scriptures and we can only surmise its length based upon the determination of the length of time for the creation process itself—that is, a seventh period of time following the placement of Adam and Even into the garden—that period of time, or day, in which the Lord rested from His labors.
It should also be kept in mind that God warned Adam while he was in the Garden that if he partook of the forbidden fruit: "... in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die...."
Adam then lived for 930 years, dying within a thousand years of leaving the Garden, or within one day to the Lord.
For those because of the so-called Geologic Ages, or for other reasons, cling to a belief that evolution and creation can be compatible, such as in the Gap Theory, it should be recognized that Paul in the scriptural record tells us that there was no sin or death until man (Adam) brought them into the world: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12).
On the other hand the evolutionary process would require billions of years of suffering and death in the world before Adam or man had sinned, and that means that God Himself would be directly responsible for sin in the world, but God, of course, could not be the author of sin. So the evolutionary process where there had already been billions of years represented by the fossils and the sedimentary rocks of the earth’s crust, which are supposed now to identify the geological ages, with death recorded in the fossil remains in rock and strata, dinosaurs, and cave man simply does not fit the scriptural record. The two are not conceivably compatible in any manner.
(See the  next post, “The Length of Time of the Earth,” to see the actual age of the Earth according to God’s word—not that of man)

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