The Daystar’s Fall
and the
Age of the Earth
Central Highlands Congregation of God
“For in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it.” Exodus 20:11
This article examines the strength of the scriptures used to support the Ruin-Restoration Gap Theory, which is widely taught in various Christian churches. This theory claims that the blank space between the end of Genesis 1:1 and the start of Genesis 1:2 actually represents a vast amount of time, a “Gap”, of as many billions of years as the materialistic scientists currently claim the universe is old. The usual story is that during these billions of years, God created the earth, filled it with life and placed Daystar (also called Lucifer in a few Latin-influenced Bibles), a powerful angel, in charge of it. At some point during these millions of years, Daystar decided to rebel against God and become God himself. He convinced a third of the angels to join him in his battle against God. During this war, the earth’s surface was destroyed and flooded with water. Daystar then became Satan (Hebrew for Adversary) and he and his unfaithful angels, now called demons, were all cast to the earth. The claim is that this war explains the ‘ruined’ and flooded state of the earth in Genesis 1:2, which has to be re-created.
My counter proposal is that the ‘Gap’ between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 does not exist, and the Bible teaches that our entire physical universe was created during the six nights and days of Creation Week, even including Daystar and all the other angels. Therefore their rebellion occurred after Creation Week, and did not result in the destruction of the earth or “Satan’s Flood”. We will look at the scriptures to see which scenarios really fit.
What follows is a generalised version of a letter sent to Fred Coulter and the elders of Christian Biblical Church of God in December 2019, challenging them to fill in the many Scriptural gaps that exist in their version, and therefore in all of the other versions, of these Pre-Adamic scenarios.
The letter was written after studying what CBCG and others presented on this subject.
There is also the Day-Age version of this scenario, in which there is not just one or occasionally two gaps, but every day of creation week is stretched out into whatever amount of time they would like it to be. It is discussed in the Appendix of this article.
I have a Master’s degree in Applied Science, and though I do not claim to be an expert in origins, I have studied it intensively from both Biblical and secular viewpoints for several decades.
First, let’s look at Fred Coulter’s reasons for believing the earth and universe are extremely old.
In their Creation/Re-creation transcript Fred says:
“If the heavens and the earth, the sum totality of it all, was created only 6,000 years ago:
• What on earth was God doing for all the rest of eternity until 6,000 years ago?
• Why did He wait so long to create the earth?”
This is repeated in their How Old is the Earth message, part 1. Fred later states that the universe is billions of years old and in the Creation-Re-creation message that “the earth can be many millions and millions and hundreds of millions of years old”, and in various places Fred claims that only those who are ignorant and fools would believe the earth is only about 6000 years old. Sadly, Fred is not alone: all the anti-Christian atheists also make the same derogatory slanders.
But Fred’s two questions show a deficient understanding of eternity: Compared with eternity, even the 13.8 billion years that the secular atheists claim as the age of the universe is less than a blink of the eye. What was God doing for the trillions of trillions of years before that? Neither 13 billion nor 600 million nor 6000 years can answer that question, nor does CBCG attempt to explain what God was doing for most of the many billions of years they claim existed between creating the stars and the earth.
But it is likely that God only created time as we know it at the beginning of Creation Week, because space, mass and time are inter-related, so speculation on what God did before then, and how long He did it, is beyond our understanding. Either option means that the two questions above are just empty sensationalism.
Though I cannot think of any Scripture that clearly says what Jehovah God was doing before He created the heavens and the earth, I have at least one idea: He was planning and designing all the details of the universe He was going to create, beginning with the basic properties He would give to matter, finetuning the laws of physics and progressing to all the complex integrated ecosystems that would be needed to sustain life on our earth. And there are many reasons to believe that prior to Creation Week, God created His only begotten Son Jeshua, and they planned the Creation together (see our article Jeshua the Messiah-Is He the Son of God or Part of a Trinity? for details).
Fred also denigrates belief in a 6000 year old earth as a fallacy of “Protestants”. It seems that he believes he is superior to them in every way. But what have virtually all Bible-loving Christians believed until the Gap theory was first popularised by the Protestant Thomas Chalmers in 1814? What did the Churches of God believe down through the ages? -They believed in an earth and universe that was only a few thousand years old. And why did the long-ages gap theory become popular after 1814? Because many ‘enlightened’ scientists were now claiming that the universe, and the earth, were millions of years old. Some Protestants were willing to twist their beliefs to at least partly comply with the intelligentsia’s deep time theories. Scofield also championed the Ruin-restoration gap theory in his reference bible from 1909, and far more Protestants still embrace it today than believe in a 6000 year old earth. Why would you want to align yourself, and your congregation, with people who are willing to compromise the Bible?
As you know, none of Satan’s pagan religions teach that Jehovah God made our earth and universe about six thousand years ago from nothing physical. Many teach that the earth is incredibly old, and some teach that the universe is an endless cycle of recreation, aging and rebirth, such as Hinduism. Rabbi Bahya ben Asher (11th century, Spain) concludes, based on the Kabbalah, that the Earth is billions of years old. So please explain why you are aligning yourself with Satan’s pagan and occult cosmogonies. Don’t you believe that the Bible is adequate and God can count?
And where do the modern Young Age Creationists and all the pre-1814 CE Christians get the idea that the earth was only created about 4000 BCE? As you admit, from the detailed chronologies in Scripture from Jeshua back to Adam, and which God placed there precisely for this reason. The chronologies are coupled with Genesis chapters 1 & 2, Exodus 20:11 and Exodus 31:17, in which God clearly says three times that “in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth,” Exodus 20:11 continues with: “the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it.”
Exodus 20:11 is part of the Ten Commandments, and is therefore embedded in the only message in the Bible that God thought was so critical that He personally spoke it to the entire nation of Israel and engraved it into stone with His own hand.
These passages leave no room for billions of years. Even your own Bible translation of these verses says the same thing.
“You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take anything from it, that you may keep the commandments of Jehovah your God which I command you.
Paul tells us the value of what is written:
And Paul also warns us to not become “creative” in what we teach:
Jeshua also added His warning:
“If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? John 3:12
You are refusing to believe the earthly things that Jehovah has recorded for us in the Bible. You say we are to rightly understand the Scriptures by using one line to help understand another line. But you persist in adding blank space to blank space in God’s Word, and then claim they prove that nothing plus nothing equals billions of years. This is NOT what Jeshua nor any of his apostles taught. You have accepted and are preaching lies that could make you accursed. Please repent!!
And you say that the Bible nowhere teaches that the earth is only about 6000 years old. That is not true! As I have already shown you, the Bible teaches just that: not once, not twice, but three times. Why won’t you believe God? Does He need to tell you more than three times before you will trust Him? Or do you reject the plain teachings of God’s Word because some scientists and occultists don’t agree with Him? Please, pray for understanding about what you are doing with this, for contradicting God is evil.
And you cannot continue to pretend that the 6000 years is only the history of the earth from Adam onwards, for Jeshua says: “Have you not read that He who created at the beginning ‘created them male and female,’”, quoting Gen 1:27, and thereby stating that their creation was done “at the beginning”, not towards the very end of hundreds of millions of years of earth’s history.
In Part 2 of your How Old is the Earth, you insert the claim that the Hebrew in Genesis 1:2 can mean “the earth became without form and void” to support your proposed Pre-Adamic war on earth.
This response is from The Answers Book, available at: https://creation.com/images/pdfs/cabook/chapter3.pdf
5. It is grammatically impossible to translate the verb היה (hayah) as ‘became’ when it is combined with a vav disjunctive—in the rest of the Old Testament, vav + a noun + היה (qal perfect, 3rd person) is always translated, ‘was’ or ‘came’, but never ‘became’. Moreover the qal form of היה does not normally mean ‘became’, especially in the beginning of a text, where it usually gives the setting.
6. Also, the correct Hebrew idiom for ‘become’ is to attach a form of the verb ‘to be’ היה (hayah), e.g. ‘was’, to the preposition ‘to’ (Hebrew ל le). The verb ‘to be’ does NOT mean ‘become’ without this preposition. Since Genesis 1:2 lacks the preposition, it cannot mean ‘became’.
Their analysis is verified by examining 53 English Bible translations, most of them at Biblegateway.com, and NOT EVEN ONE of them says the earth became formless and empty, even including your own translation. Are you trying to avoid the deserved criticism you would get if you actually used became in your translation?
Became is also incompatible with an accurate translation of Isaiah 45:18, which explains both the initial state and the destiny of the earth:
“For thus says Jehovah, who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who has established it, who did not create it to be barren, who formed it to be inhabited: “I am Jehovah, and there is no other.”
But let’s go deeper. God does know how to say something has been rebuilt or restored. For example, in 2Ki 21:3, He says that the high places were built again (בנה banah וב shuwb). In 2 Pet 3:1-7, Peter tells us that God created the world, but destroyed its surface in the Great Flood, restored it and it is the world we are now living in. In Revelation 21:1, the Bible says: “And I saw the new heavens and a new earth, for the former heavens and the former earth had departed and there was no sea anymore.”
Revelation of course refers to the replacing of our existing earth and heavens after the prophesied war and judgement at the end of the Millennium. In contrast, the Bible never says anywhere that Creation Week began by rebuilding, restoring or replacing an old and battered earth and heavens. Do you really believe that God just forgot to mention the supposed billions of years of history that ‘came before’ Creation Week?
Let’s also look at the words you have translated in Gen 1:2 as “without form” (תהו tohu) and “void” (בהו bohu). In this verse you simply accept the translation of the KJV, which is close to the typical meanings of these words which are “formless” and “empty”. But then you use Jeremiah 4:20-23 to ‘prove’ that the earth was actually a broken-down graveyard enveloped in smoke and dust as a result of war before Genesis 1:2. But if you read the context (Jer 4:15 to 29), Jeremiah is referring to the still future Day of the Lord, not an event in the distant past (see Joel 2:31-3:16 for confirmation, and the same argument applies to Isaiah 24:1).
Yes, war can be very destructive. But Genesis 1:2 does not say the earth was a broken-down graveyard due to a previous war. That would require using the Hebrew words נתץ nathats קבר qeber. Instead, God merely says it was formless and empty because at that early stage of Creation Week the earth was a beautiful—but featureless and uninhabited—blue water-covered sphere when He created light so the angels could see it. It was essentially like an artist’s blank canvas; prepared but not yet used. Jehovah God and His Son Jeshua then spend most of the rest of Creation Week shaping the earth’s surface and filling it with a stunning variety of life.
In your Creation-Re-creation message, you claim that God:
“told Adam and Eve to replenish the earth! Well, if you replenished, that means that there had to be something here at one time before. Isn’t that what He told Noah and his sons after the Flood? Multiply and replenish the earth!”
But there are two problems here. First: the Hebrew word מלא malé in Genesis 1:28 and 9:1 simply means to fill. The KJV’s translation of malé as replenish should really be fill in both these verses, just as it translates malé in 156 other verses. Indeed, 48 out of 54 English Bible translations render male’ in Genesis 1:28 as fill, and with the sole exception of your “A Faithful Version”, the remaining five all identify themselves as KJV variants. Second: it was impossible for Adam and Eve to replenish the world. It had never had any people on it before they were created, so they could not refill it. They could only fill the world with people, which is exactly what the Hebrew says God told them to do.
You correctly point out that Jehovah had to create the angels before he created the earth, and quote Job 38:1-7 to confirm it. And as the angels live in the heavens, God also had to create the heavens for them to live in. But Genesis 1:1, combined with Exodus 20:11 & 31:17 make it clear that God created the empty space for the heavens, then the angels and then the earth ALL during the dark period of Day One of Creation Week. God did not require the millions of years that evolutionists need. And the book of Job does not say that any of these things were created before Creation Week began.
But you claim that God made the heavens and the angels millions, perhaps billions of years ago. Please tell me the book, chapter and verse where God says that He created the heavens and the Daystar (Lucifer) billions, or even millions of years ago. Indeed, I cannot find a single scripture where God actually says any such thing. Instead, the Bible gives us a clear chain of history going back for a bit over six thousand years, and no further. The first four thousand years of history are summarised in Luke 3:23-38. There is no sign of any previous history of our earth, or any other earth, only your anti-biblical and unsubstantiated “gap” speculations.
You also attempt to use Psalm 148 to support your long age claims by insisting that it proves that the sun and stars were made before the earth. But it does no such thing. It is a hymn calling all of Creation to praise Jehovah, our Creator. It makes no claim to be a history of God’s Creative sequence. In contrast, Genesis chapter 1 specifically makes that claim and clearly shows that the very first physical object that God placed into His new heavens was our earth. It also clearly says that it was not until Day Four that He made the sun, moon and stars (Gen 1:14-19). Your principles of Bible study correctly say you should use the clear scriptures to interpret the less clear. Why do you not apply your own principle in this case, acknowledge that God made the earth first and admit that the anti-biblical astronomers who deny this sequence are wrong?
It is time to be honest. Here is what Jehovah God personally spoke before all of Israel:
“For in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it.
Exodus 20:11
If you say, even indirectly, that these words which God spoke and wrote in stone with His own finger, and what Jeshua said to confirm them are false, you are calling both Jehovah God and His Son Jeshua liars and you are destroying His main basis for us knowing and observing His Sabbath. And that is precisely what you are doing! Why are you doing this? Have you lost your mind? Do you not understand that this entire pre-Adamic Satanic scenario panders to Satan’s lust for attention and fame? God placed Satan in charge of the earth for millions of years? In Creation-Re-creation you say that God “originally created it (the earth) in a beautiful form for the angels, for the one who became Satan.” What?!! God made the earth for Satan? Where is even one scripture that gives him that glory, even when he was the Daystar? And he has only usurped the position of lord on earth partially and temporarily today because Adam and Eve succumbed to his lies. Satan/Daystar never had the earth made for him, nor has Jehovah ever commissioned him as Lord of the Earth. Revelation 21:2-3 show us that God has made the earth for Himself and His Children, not for Satan.
Before we examine your Satanic Pre-creation week earth scenario in more detail, let’s look carefully at some of your ‘scientific’ arguments for a very old universe.
First, you claim that the existence of starlight coming from very distant stars and galaxies proves they are millions, even billions of years old.
You initiate this idea with a correct description of how we know how far away the North Star is. But you have not done your research well. We can measure the distance to the North Star using trigonometry because it is only 433 light years away. This means that we are currently seeing light that left that star in 1586CE. Contrary to your claims, seeing the North Star does not conflict with a 6000 year old earth.
However, it is likely that the most distant galaxies we can see with our best telescopes are billions of light years away at their current locations and current light speeds. If you had been keeping up with Young Earth Creationist research, you would know that they have several competing theories that explain how we can see light from objects that are billions of light years distant. The one I favour is that of Dr. John Hartnett, an astrophysicist who proposed that the Universe was very much smaller when it was first created and then it was stretched out to its present size. The rapid stretching process altered time, space and light speed, allowing light from even the most distant objects to reach earth in a matter of weeks. (In Starlight, Time and New Physics) This model both explains what we see and reconciles it with Genesis 1, etc:
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to divide between the day and the night; and let them be for signs, and for appointed times, and for days, and years:
“And let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so.
And God made two great lights and the stars: the greater light for ruling the day, and the lesser light for ruling the night. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
And there was evening and there was morning: Fourth Day. Genesis 1:14 to 19
And also with Isa 40:22, 44:24, 48:13, 51:13, Psa 104:2 and Isa 42:5:
“Thus says Jehovah God, ‘Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it, Who gives breath to the people on it, and spirit to those who walk on it?’”
Again, why would you reject this theory which honours God and His Word and instead accept and teach one devised by men who despise and ridicule Jehovah God?
We can do the same with radioactive dating. Again, there are several competing theories devised by Christian scientists which explain how we can have the appearance of billions of years of radioactive decay occurring in only a few thousand years. In this instance, my preferred explanation is that of Walter Brown, and forms part of his hydroplate theory in his latest online edition of “In the Beginning”: https://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/IntheBeginningTOC.html. And while on the topic of radioactive decay, the RATE project has found evidence for extremely rapid radioactive decay in the recent past, resulting in large amounts of helium trapped in porous rocks. They also found that there are significant amounts of radioactive carbon in diamonds, coal and ancient fossils, sometimes claimed to be hundreds of millions of years old, that date them at less than 60,000 years old. It is introduced here: https://www.icr.org/research/rate/
Evolutionists cannot explain these ‘problems’, and so they ignore them while they try to convince people the earth is billions of years old, and therefore the Bible is untrue. Again, who do you believe: Anti-bible atheists, or God’s Word?
And how about the fossils buried deeply in the rocks? You claim they are evidence that there was a pre-Creation war on earth. We will look at them later, as this fits in more intimately with the Fall of the Daystar scenario.
I am familiar with your arguments for a pre-Adamic/pre-creation week occupation of earth. But I suspect they are based on nothing better than unBiblical conjectures that you were taught at Ambassador College by someone who had a Scofield Reference Bible. This brings to mind the warning from Jeremiah 16:19: “Surely our fathers have inherited lies, worthlessness and unprofitable things.” If we are to grow as Christians, lies must be replaced with Truth. Let’s look at some of these arguments closely, and see where you need to provide the scriptures I am not aware of to correct my ‘deficient understanding’ of the Bible:
First, you claim that God created the heavens, the angels and earth long, long before Creation Week. By this, you imply that it took a long time to make all the angels and have them mature to a point where they would become useful to God. But Eze 28:15 denies that, as it says that Daystar was “perfect in your ways from the day you were created”. So he was formed and became fully functional immediately. And is it not likely that the day he was created was a day in the week in which everything else was created- in this case the first day of Creation Week? We see that Adam and Chavvah (Eve) were likewise created during Creation Week and immediately were fully functioning adult humans. It is quite reasonable to believe that the angels were created on Day One just before the earth was created.
And let us think about Creation Week somewhat more deeply. God says this:
Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning: The Sixth Day.
Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them were finished. Genesis 1:31 & 2:1
God says that at the end of the sixth day, EVERYTHING was very good, and He includes the heavens as well as the earth. If Daystar and his angels had already rebelled and they were in prison on earth, an earth which already contained the remains of untold billions of creatures killed in their war, could God possibly call all of this “very good”? No. Everything was very good because so far there had been no death, no sin and no rebellion. Satan’s rebellion was after Creation Week.
I have already quoted three scriptures which deny a Pre-Creation Week earth, and ask you again to provide even one scripture that actually supports your claim.
You also claim that God made the Daystar the Lord of this pre-Adamic earth. I can find no supporting scripture. What I do find is totally different:
Eze 28:14-15 says that the Daystar (Lucifer) was in fact created to be one of God’s Covering Cherubs who walked in the midst of the Stones of Fire. This means that He was one of God’s top angels who lived with Him beside God’s Throne in heaven. So God made him Lord of Earth and forgot to clearly mention that to us? The closest you come to that is when Ezekiel 28:13 says that he was in the Garden of Eden. Yes, he was, and we have that account in Genesis chapter 3. But that encounter was AFTER Adam and Eve were created, even after Creation Week, and he was not there as the lord of earth. God was there Himself as Lord of the Earth. Daystar was probably sent there as one of the angels who were to help, teach and protect the humans.
Then you say that the Daystar and the angels that rebelled with him were cast to earth. Yes, the Bible says they were, but that places the Angelic War in heaven, not on the earth, as they could not be cast down onto a planet they were already on, nor could it be done before Creation Week, as they could not be cast down onto a planet that the Bible says did not even exist yet.
You also claim that Jeshua’s statement in Luke relates to Satan being cast down to the pre-Adamic earth. Let’s read the context:
Then the seventy He had sent returned with great joy, and said to Him, “Our Lord, even the demons are subject to us by Your Name.”
And He said to them, “I saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven. Behold, I give authority to you to trample on serpents and scorpions and all the power of the enemy, and nothing will harm you. Luke 10:17 to 19
Though we are not specifically told what Satan’s first sinful act was, it is likely that we have it recorded in Genesis. I think that when Daystar discovered that he, the great and wonderful Covering Cherub, was to become the servant of what he viewed as the weak and pathetic humans, and that they and their descendants were made in the Image of God and were to become the children of God and he and the other angels were not, it was too much for his swelling self-importance. He decided to demonstrate how unworthy the humans were by getting them to break the commandment God gave them: “Do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” Daystar was willing to lie, even to call God a liar, to induce them to do it. And when, even after they failed, God provided a covering for the humans and rebuked Daystar for his actions, he decided that he would make a better God than Jehovah and instigated a full-fledged rebellion against God. He now became Satan—the Adversary—and was able to convince a third of the angels to join him. They launched an attack against God on His throne in Heaven, lost and were then cast to earth. And once again, there was no need for millions of years. In a matter of seconds, Jehovah would have disarmed and imprisoned them, somewhat like the scenario we see in Rev 20:9. The most vile of the fallen angels were locked away, otherwise they would have destroyed humanity totally. Those that were left have served God indirectly by testing us to see who will choose to listen to and obey God.
So, there was no need for God to destroy the earth to defeat Satan, and therefore no need for a pre-Adamic Flood to wipe out all life on earth.
Though some details of my proposed scenario are speculative, they do fit comfortably within what we are told in scripture. And most, perhaps all, of the above has been proposed down through time by other Christians. Unlike the relatively new Gap scenario, this scenario has no need to contradict Scripture by inventing a deep time pre-history for the earth, based on nothing more than a spurious pause within a verse and a spurious gap between verses, and then transferring these ‘events’ into that unbiblical ‘timeframe’.
But then you admit that virtually all the layers above the Morrison have been laid down in Noah’s Flood about 4500 years ago, and say the standard dating of these layers are not accurate. So you admit that layers supposedly up to 148 million years old are actually only a few thousand years old. If these layers are that far wrong, why do you think they have dated any of the layers below them correctly? And as you acknowledge Noah’s Flood as a devastating world-wide event, you know that you cannot appease the deep-time believers, so why are you submitting to them at all?
Lynn Torrance’s two flood claim is a myth, and I do not know of any geologists who support that story today, nor could Lynn name even one geologist who believed it in 1964. It is also significant (and encouraging) that in Philip Neal’s Part 2 update (Modern Geology Compelled to Recognize Catastrophism), he does not suggest that the demise of the dinosaurs marks the end of one destructive flood and the beginning of another. Instead, he merely confirms that the dinosaurs died in a catastrophic flood. And none of the protestant scientists he quotes would agree that the rock evidence indicates a pre-Adamic world that was destroyed by a flood, rebuilt and then destroyed again by a later second flood. They are all young-earth Creationists and see the demise of these dinosaurs as part of the sequential destruction caused by the Great Flood during Noah’s life.
Walt Brown’s Hydroplate Theory, available free at https://kgov.com/walt-brown-in-the-beginning-pdf-of-the-draft-of-the-9th-edition will give you a feeling for how truly destructive the rupture of the Fountains of the Great Deep was, and show how the Great Flood is responsible for almost all of our sedimentary and volcanic rocks and fossils.
As for the ‘dates’ used by the deep time advocates, over the last 30 years numerous finds of unfossilised dinosaur blood vessels, connective tissue and DNA have been found. Lab studies have shown repeatedly that this material will degrade in only thousands of years, even under the most favourable conditions. This means these dinosaur remains are only thousands of years old, and thus fit comfortably within the Biblical timeline of Noah’s Flood.
These are all very serious problems with for these deep-time pre-Creation Week ideas, but are consistent with the Bible’s real history.
So please enlighten me. Where are the scriptures which actually say that Satan’s rebellion occurred before Adam and Eve fell? Where are the scriptures that say God destroyed Satan’s pre-Creation Week world with a flood? I can’t see anywhere that you quoted them, and I certainly can’t find any myself.
And so, how do I, and the others who believe that the earth is young, account for these “old” fossils? We believe that prior to Noah’s Flood, the world was fully inhabited with lush and productive ecosystems everywhere. During the Great Flood, they were all killed and most of the organisms were rapidly buried under chemical-rich waters, which resulted in many of them being fossilized. Most of the earth’s sedimentary rocks were laid down in just a few months during the Flood. The range of radioactive ‘dates’ of the rocks are due to variations in the ratios of radioactive isotopes present in the volcanic rocks that were extruded as the flood progressed, which is explained best by the Hydroplate theory. To summarise it, the vast layers of sedimentary rocks were laid down and even eroded very rapidly, not slowly over millions and billions of years. The Great Flood that caused all of this and its aftermath is explained carefully in four chapters of Genesis (6 to 9). In contrast, Satan’s Flood, supposedly the source of all the sediments and fossils up to the dinosaurs, is not even mentioned, including your attempt to hijack Genesis 1:2. Restated, the Great Flood of Noah’s day explanation is consistent with our world and the Bible. The Ruin-Restoration Gap explanation is inconsistent and is NOT in the Bible.
And one more point: God’s Spirit hovering over the water-covered earth at the start of Creation Week also left its traces. They are the deepest sedimentary layers, and contain absolutely no trace of living organisms, not even bacteria. They are relatively thin compared with the fossil-bearing rocks from Noah’s Flood, which is what we expect from the short time period the earth was under water in Creation Week. But it was long enough to form a good layer of soil. All this is fully consistent with Genesis 1, as no life had been created on earth yet.
The answer is that they were not part of Satan’s imaginary world, but part of our real world. And as these scriptures show, some of them still existed hundreds of years after Noah’s Flood. Indeed, there are precise drawings, carvings and sculptures of various dinosaurs from around the world that predate their rediscovery as fossils. Vance Nelson has carefully documented dozens of these exact matches from all over the world in his excellent book Dire Dragons. It seems that the last dinosaurs have only died out a few hundred years ago.
Though you don’t seem to use 2 Peter 3:3-6, it is commonly claimed by others to refer to Satan’s Flood. That claim fails on three points: In 1 Peter 3:20 Peter indisputably refers to Noah’s Flood, and in 2 Peter, he clearly describes the earth as it was at the beginning of Creation Week and how it was subsequently destroyed by the Great Flood, and thirdly, he says that the scoffers will deny that Flood, as we see happening today. Noah’s Flood is clearly recorded in the Bible as history and as punishment for sin and is clearly recorded in the rocks and surface features of our earth. Satan’s Flood is nothing more than the space after a full stop between sentences, so why would these scoffers even suggest it is part of the Bible?
I will summarise in Table 1 the missing Scriptures that you need to supply to Biblically substantiate all the pre-Creation Week scenarios you present. Could you please fill in the blanks for me, for the members of CBCG and for their children, so we can all be confident that the Pre-Adamic Creation-Ruin-Re-creation theory is scriptural?
Required Scripture | Found at: Book Chap:Verse |
Universe created billions of years ago | ____ __:__ |
Angels created billions to millions of years ago | ____ __:__ |
Earth created hundreds of millions of years ago | ____ __:__ |
Sun and stars created before the earth | ____ __:__ |
Daystar (Lucifer) commissioned as Lord of Earth | ____ __:__ |
God (or Daystar) creates dinosaurs as part of Daystar’s ecosystems | ____ __:__ |
Daystar leads rebellion against Jehovah God millions of years ago | ____ __:__ |
Angelic war is then fought on earth | ____ __:__ |
War results in the death and burial of all physical life on earth, so there was widespread death before Adam and Eve sinned. | ____ __:__ |
God sends a flood on the earth to destroy the works of the demons (aka Satan’s Flood). | ____ __:__ |
God destroys all dinosaurs (dragons) in Satan’s Flood | ____ __:__ |
God recreates the earth after this war and flood | ____ __:__ |
Remember that Exodus 20:11 and 31:17 say “For in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day.” The Bible leaves NO possibility of the universe or earth existing prior to Creation Week.
And as it is impossible to substantiate these Satanic pre-Creation Week claims with explicit supporting Scriptures, for you would already be using them if they existed, I urge you to renounce these anti-Biblical myths and stop teaching people that God’s timeline is incomplete and that those who believe in the Bible’s real history are ignorant and foolish. Now is your opportunity to prove that you really are a Scripturalist.
By Bruce Armstrong, in conjunction with our concerned brethren at
Central Highlands Congregation of God
PO Box 236, Creswick, Vic, 3363 Australia
info@chcpublications.net
January, 2020
Fred Coulter has released a two-part Audio Message as a response to this article, entitled God’s Creation & Satan’s Rebellion. It is essentially a rehash of what he has said previously, which has been quoted in the article above. He begins by implying that I do not believe that the angels were created before man and had been on the earth before they rebelled. But the above article shows clearly that I believe both those things. It is Fred’s unBiblical pre-Creation Week timeline and the events he attaches to it that I object to. His message never mentions the empty Table above, and he does not provide one single scripture to fill it in. He totally ignores Exodus 20:11 and 31:17, which exposes every pre-creation week scenario as lies. Ignoring these scriptures does not remove them from the Bible.
He does not repeat three of his errors (wrong distance to the North Star, the two-flood boundary role of the Morrison Formation and his multi-billion year “pause” in the middle in Genesis 1:1) but replaces them with new ones, such as his claims that the earth is held in its orbit and rotated by magnetic forces, and—weirdly—there is a city beneath Antarctica built by aliens. Any book on astronomy will confirm that it is gravitational forces that keep us in orbit around the sun. Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the solar wind, which would destroy our atmosphere.
The main, and fatal, flaw in the Day-Age theory is the very idea that the days of the Creation Week can be anything but normal days. The Bible clearly defines the days of Creation Week as standard 24 hours days. In God’s Calendar, each day ends at the evening and the next day, or more precisely the night portion of the next day begins.
This sequence is clearly defined in Leviticus 23:32
“It shall be to you a Sabbath of Sabbath observance, and you shall afflict your souls; on the ninth day of the new moon at evening, from evening to evening, you shall celebrate your Sabbath.”
This passage is speaking of the Day of Atonement, but tells us that a Biblical day, including God’s High Day Sabbaths, runs from evening to evening.
But does this principle apply to the days of Creation Week? What would God need to put there to show us that they are normal Biblical days? Surely if He told us that each new day began at evening that should prove it. And how about if He even told us that there was a dawn or a morning between each of the evenings? That should clinch it. And then how about if He tells us that He did all of the Creative work during Creation Week in six days? Could we really ask for more proof than that? And then let Him put in place a perpetual seven day cycle, with the seventh-day set aside as a special day to remember His Creation and celebrate what He has done in that original week. Surely that should always remind us every single week that the Creation Week was a normal week in length.
So, what has God written for us in the first two chapters of Genesis? Let’s have a look:
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning: Day One.
And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning: Second Day.
And there was evening and there was morning: Third Day.
And there was evening and there was morning: Fourth Day.
And there was evening and there was morning: Fifth Day.
Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning: The Sixth Day.
Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. Genesis 1:5, 1:8, 1:13, 1:19, 1:23, 1:31 & 2:1
So, what do we have so far? God has indeed told us that each day has an evening and a morning. These are very specific events that only have any meaning if they refer to parts of a day. And to make His point even stronger, He goes farther than we proposed. He also tells us that each of these periods were, in fact, a day. And not only that, He even numbers the days for us, so there can be no doubt that He is telling about six days, and not just any six days, but six consecutive days during which He made everything. And not only did He make everything, but at the end of the six days everything was both very good and finished.
So what does God do then?
And by the seventh day God had completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because He rested from all His work in it, which He had created and made. Genesis 2:2 to 3
So we see that God rested on that seventh day, and also blessed and sanctified it. But is it the Sabbath? Let’s see:
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
“Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of Jehovah your God. You shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your livestock, nor your stranger who is within your gates.
Can it be made any clearer? God has not only fulfilled all the things we could think of to show us that He created everything during six days, but has even embedded the Sabbath in His Ten Commandments to remind us that He is our Creator and even how and when He created.
Isn’t that what this idea is all about? Let’s look at the Hebrew:
Day is יום yome. It has the same meanings in Hebrew as English: It can mean the daylight part of a day, or an entire 24 hour day. Again like English, we use the context to know in which way it is being used. Age, in the sense of a very long period of time is עולם olam. Olam is used 439 times in the Old Covenant. In not even one of those times does the Bible say a Day can be an Age. So there is NO biblical justification for claiming that the days of Creation Week can be Ages of time.
The best that the Day-Age people can come up with is this:
However, there are three problems with using this verse to claim that the days of Creation Week can be billions of years long:
First: The statement itself is a problem: If a day can be one thousand years to God, this means that at most the six days of Creation week gives them an additional six thousand years. If you add this to the six thousand years that the bible chronologies allow back to Adam, who was created on the sixth day, you now have twelve thousand years. Given that the usual Day-Age believer agrees with the atheists that the universe is about 14 billion years old, the extra six thousand years are pretty much useless to them.
Second: The context makes it clear that Peter is referring to the time lapse between Jeshua’s Ascension and Return. He is warning his fellow Christians that what the Eternal God sees as a short time could be thousands of years. And so it is that we have now been waiting for Jeshua’s Return for almost two thousand years. But there is nothing in the quoted verse or its context to link it to Creation Week or to suggest that the days of Creation Week are anything but normal 24 hour days.
Third: 2 Peter 3:8 is talking of days and years. But the reality is that the Day-Age theorists need a verse that says a day can be an Age that lasts for billions of years. But they have no such verse anywhere in the entire Bible. Which means that the entire Day-Age theory is unBiblical, and should be immediately rejected by all Bible-believing Christians.
The Day-Age theory usually tries to claim that God created the various stars, planets and living organisms progressively over billions of years, in an attempt to align the Bible with the materialists’ cosmogonies and evolutionary theory. But God has created everything in such a way that He defies their ideas at every turn.
As we saw in the Gap Theory section, the Big-Bang Theory proposes that the stars were created billions of years before the earth, and the earth was originally a molten ball. But God says the opposite: He created the earth first, and it was a cool water-covered sphere, and then four days later He created the sun, moon and all of the stars of the universe during a single day. And He says they were all created only about six thousand years ago. There is no possible way to make these two scenarios match.
There are a number of fatal flaws with theistic evolution:
Second: As in the Gap Theory, the Day-Age theory claims that most of the fossil record was laid down before Adam and Chavvah (Eve) were created. So, contrary to the Bible, we have disease and death for many hundreds of millions of years before Adam and Chavvah fell. This is not the world that our Creator God called ‘very good”. Jehovah is not incompetent. He would never use a process as slow, wasteful and destructive as evolution to shape His creatures.
God is very specific about the origins of Adam, the first man:
We did not evolve. God created us directly from dust. The Bible does not say that God redesigned a human-looking animal and placed a soul in it as Ross claims. And the dating of the pre-6000 year fossils is based on incorrect assumptions that yield greatly exaggerated dates.
God is also very specific about the unique origins of Chavvah (aka Eve), the first woman:
And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which Jehovah God had taken from the man He built into a woman, and He brought her to the man.
So Chavvah was not created from dust, nor was she the result of billions of years of evolution. She was a special creation of God, probably built within minutes.
The efforts of the Day-Age conjecture to reconcile the Bible with the deep time of the Big Bang and evolution fails on all counts. God insists that we believe Him and trust in His Word. When we turn to Him, repent of our sinfulness, accept the sacrifice of Jeshua in our place and are filled by His Spirit, this becomes a fulfilling and wonderful way to live. Evolutionists live in a meaningless world formed by random events and die without any hope. Day-Age believers live in a confusing world with a Bible they don’t really trust. We live in a world made by our glorious God, who gave us a trustworthy Bible and offers us Everlasting Life on an earth that will be recreated as a Paradise with Him and His Son Jeshua, surrounded by people who love and care for each other.
Why live a brief and meaningless life and then be dead forever, when God offers you so much more?
Central Highlands Congregation of God
Published by
CENTRAL HIGHLANDS CHRISTIAN PUBLICATIONS
PO Box 236, Creswick, Vic 3363 Australia
Email info@chcpublications.net
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Copyright © 2020
Revised 13 November
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Scripture quotations are taken from the Central Highlands Congregation of God version.
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The Holy Bible - CHCoG Version - This translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic is accurate and readable, giving you a clear understanding of how the New and Old Covenants are interlocked and God’s message to you.
Everlasting Life is God’s Gift - Does the Bible teach that you have everlasting life? If not, how can you receive God’s gift of immortality as His child?
Fifty Years in the Church of Rome - Charles Chiniquy, a famous Catholic priest for 25 years, recounts his experiences that led him to God’s Gift of Salvation.
Jeshua the Messiah: Is He the Son of God or Part of a Trinity? - Explores the relationships between God the Father, our Lord Jeshua, the Holy Spirit and us.
Books of Moses - Fact or Fiction Series - Are the miracles recorded in Genesis and Exodus our true history? Do the facts support Special Creation or the Big Bang & Evolution scenarios? What about the Flood, Babel and the Exodus?
What is God’s Name? - How can we know what God’s Name is and how to Pronounce it? Does the Bible teach us to use God’s Name?
The Ten Commandments - What are God’s Ten Commandments? How do they guide us in our relationships with God, our family and our neighbours? Shows how obedience to Jehovah’s Instructions would result in true civilization.
God’s Calendar and the Sign of Jonah - Shows how God’s Calendar reveals that Jeshua truly kept the Sign of Jonah, His proof that He is the Messiah.
The Sabbath in Scripture - Has God’s Seventh-day Sabbath been ‘done away with’? What does the Sabbath mean, and does God want us to keep it?
Sex, God and Families - Pamphlet exposing the dangers of sexual immorality and outlining the benefits of following God’s sexual principles.
Eastern Meditation and Jeshua the Messiah - Recounts the experiences of a CHCoG member who became a Christian while practising Eastern Meditation.
Spirit, Soul and Body - Take a deeper look at the Bible’s teachings about the composition of human beings and the roles of our soul and spirit.
Radiocarbon Dating - Shows how changes in radioactive carbon levels can drastically alter radiocarbon dates. Not heavily technical.
Rome’s Challenge: Why do Protestants Keep Sunday? - This Roman Catholic article proves there is no scriptural basis for changing the seventh-day Sabbath to Sunday, and shows that the Roman Catholic church made the change.
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Calculated Biblical Calendar - Calculates dates of Annual Holy Days, Crucifixion, Flood, Creation: allows you to test the new moon visibility locally.
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Endnotes
1 This pause seems to be unique to Fred. The rest of his Ruin-Restoration teaching is standard gap theory. The pause is apparently intended to allow for the huge time lag between the origin of the universe and the origin of the earth that the Big Bang cosmogony proposes.
2 Psa 119:97-104
3 Paul is speaking of his teachings, which are entirely based on the Bible and what Jeshua taught him. Many churches today are already teaching another Good News, another Jeshua, and another timeline.
4 Perhaps Satan was in heaven at that time accusing the brethren before God, as we see him doing in Job chapters 1 & 2.
5 Read Contested Bones by Rupe and Sanford for an excellent analysis of these fossils, and of others that the media falsely claims are our ape-like ancestors.
6 This insistence on the separating role of the Morrison Formation may also be unique to Fred Coulter. Other Gap theorists are more vague, such as Lynn Torrance quoted on page 19.
7 I live in Central Victoria, Australia, where most of our exposed sedimentary layers are older than the Morrison. And yet there are layers of hard rock interbedded by unconsolidated sediments, confirming the essential role of cementing chemistry.
8 This idea is dealt with in more detail in our article Dinosaurs and Their Creator.
9 You can read a more thorough discussion of most of these Gap theory topics in Weston Fields’ book Unformed and Unfilled.
10 Such as refusing to honestly translate God’s Name (יְהׂוָ֨ה) as Jehovah throughout his Bible translation and insisting on using the inaccurate Judaic calculated calendar (See God’s Calendar and the Sign of Jonah).—these are both parts of the unBiblical traditions of Judaism which Fred claims to reject. He also insists on observing the Passover too soon, as explained by Stanford Beattie in Resolving the Passover Controversy.
11 Fred Coulter and CBCG correctly reject the Day-Age theory as unBiblical. We have included this Appendix as it covers the other major way that some Christians attempt to reconcile the Bible with the millions and billions of years claimed by naturalists/evolutionists.
12 Gen 1:1-2:3, Exo 31:12-17, Mat 12:8, 2Th 3:10-12
13 Psalm 90:4, Lord Jah as in the Peshitta.
14 Evolutionists cannot realistically explain how the supposedly ‘simple’ cell could ever have come into existence, nor can they explain how the enormous amounts of precise and detailed new information could come into existence to allow any new or more complex organism to arise. All they have is unsubstantiated Just-so stories. This is dealt with in more detail in our Books of Moses - Fact or Fiction series.
15 As God says that He has directly created all of the basic kinds of organisms, we would not expect to find organisms that are transitional between the different kinds. Evolution, of course, requires that there must be enormous numbers of transitional forms as the creatures evolve from one thing to another. The fossil record only contains a very few proposed transitional forms, and even they are disputed.
16 See our CHCoG translation and our Animals in the Bible article, both at https://chcpublications.net/ for confirmation. Also note that the Bible says both that we have souls and that we are souls, in much the same way that day can mean both the daytime and a 24 hour day.
17 It is likely that the breath of life was not just air, but also an imparting of the spirit of man, enabling Adam to not merely be alive, though comatose, but to be a conscious, fully functioning human. - 1Co 2:11, 1 Thes 5:23, Job 32:8, Joh 20:22 & Ecc 12:6-7. Also quoted in 1Co 15:44-49.
18 1Co 11:7, Eph 5:30, 1 Tim 2:13. It is possible that Jehovah God used a similar process to create His Son Jeshua from Himself. More on these topics in Jeshua the Messiah- Is he the Son of God or Part of a Trinity?