One day I’m going to be in heaven and I can ask God all of these questions I have about creation and the Bible. But for now, I’ll just have to try and intelligently make sense of everything. There are two camps of people who believe in Creationism: first, those who believe God created everything in 7 literal 24 hour days and second, those who believe that it could have been any length of time because “a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day.”
Me? I’m on the fence. I keep going back and forth between the two. The writer of the accounts of Creation we have in Genesis is pretty clear that each day was a period of darkness and a period of daylight. So, 24 hours, right? But then you get to a passage of Scripture like this:
The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. (Genesis 2:18-20)
Could Adam really have named all of the animals in the same day? So that makes me lean more towards the other side. I just don’t see how it could have happened in 7 literal days…unless the writer of Genesis got his timetable wrong and the animals were named after everything was done. But I don’t think so.
This is how Donald Miller thinks about it:
I wondered how long it must have taken him to journey to the ocean to name the sea life, and whether he had to make a boat and go out on a boat or whether God had them swim up close to the shore, so Adam only had to in about waist-deep.
I looked up how many animals there are in the world, and it turns out there are between ten million and one hundred million different species. So even if you believe in evolution, that means there were between one million and fifty million species around in the time of the Garden, and Adam, apparently had to name all of them. And the entire time he was lonely.
I never thought of Adam the same again. The image of the man holding the fig leaf over his privates seemed nearly crude. Rather this was a man who, despite feeling a certain need for a companion, performed what must have been nearly one hundred years of work, naming and perhaps even categorizing the animals. It would have taken him nearly a year just to name the species of snakes alone. Moses said Eve didn’t give birth to their third child till Adam was well into his hundreds, which means they would have had Cain and Abel some thirty or so years before, which also means either it took Adam more than a hundred years to name the animals, or he and Eve didn’t have sex for a good, long boring century (emphasis mine).
What a different way to think about this! Miller goes on to talk about how the whole time Adam was naming the animals there wasn’t a companion found for him. He couldn’t communicate with them the way he would with another human. But God didn’t give him a companion until after all of the animals were named.
So here was this guy who was intensely relational, needing other people, and in order to cause him to appreciate the gift of companionship, God had him hang out with chimps for a hundred years. It’s quite beautiful, really. God directed Adam’s steps so that when He created Eve, Adam would have the utmost appreciation, respect, and gratitude.
How cool is that? The more I think about it logically, the more I’m convinced that Miller is right.
Tags: Christianity, Creation, Creationism, Adam, Eve
I don’t think he named every species of snake. I always thought he would have named the broader classes of animals.
(Group squirrels together, group spiders together, group hawks together, etc.) I could be wrong, I wasn’t there.
The romantic in me agrees with your quotation. (I had accepted this myself several years ago, when another oragnization; whose name escapes my memory; said something simmilar)
Their thesis was that the following is recorded in Genesis 2:
18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
19 Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
20 The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.
21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
22 The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
I believe that when God and Adam were looking for a “helper” Adam catalogued the whole Animal kingdom. And Adam got to witness all the beauty of God’s creation. But it was not until God created woman, and she HAD to be the most beautiful created thing Adam laid his eyes on, that Adam found his helper.
The exhortation of the speaker at this center was that God as an “Eve” for every man in His creation, and an “Adam” for every woman; and that thought is so very awesome to me.