Cheryl Schatz

gengwall,

Well, Cheryl, I think you are employing some presumptive reasoning. You presume 24 hour days so you presume that the period between the mist falling over the earth to water the seeds and the forming of the man occurred within hours of each other (i.e. not long enough for the plants to sprout or the man to get too hungry).

Genesis 2:5 gives the reason why there was no shrubs or plants. It is two fold – no moisture sent and no man to cultivate the ground.

Gen 2:5 Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.

If this was changed millions of years before Adam, then there would be no point in the account to mention why there was no plants that had yet grown if they had been around for millions of years. Everything in chapter two revolves around the man and the bare earth also is focused on the wait for the cultivator.

The next issue is Genesis chapter 1. In each one of the verses where it says “God said” “God saw” “God placed” etc, the verbs are all prefixed sequential. Genesis 1:27-31 is all sequential so that the animals weren’t given the green plants for food until after man was created. I have gone through each of the verbs and they are all sequential. That doesn’t cause a problem for me since I believe the creation days were ordinary days, but it does pose a problem in my mind for old earthers to have animals alive for millions of years without God’s permission to eat the plants (which apparently didn’t sprout until man as ruler of the earth was created). I don’t see this as presumption, just taking the account as it was written with the time line given in the sequential account.

Does this make any sense?