for your review. . . .

As promised here are those quotes from the message last Sunday. . . .

The creation story has stood as a bulwark against a succession of fashionable errors -- polytheism, dualism, the eternity of matter, the evil of matter, astrology -- and not least against the tendency to empty human history of meaning. It resists this nihilism explicitly, in displaying man as God’s image and regent, but also implicitly, in presenting the tremendous acts of creation as a mere curtain raiser to the drama that slowly unfolds throughout the length of the Bible. The prologue is over in a page; there are a thousand to follow.

If every generation has needed this emphasis, perhaps, none has had greater need of it than the age of scientific knowledge. The scientific account of the universe . . . overwhelms us with statistics that reduce our apparent significance to a vanishing-point. Not the prologue, but the human story itself, is now the single page in a thousand, and the whole terrestrial volume is lost among the uncatalogued millions. Through the apparent naivety of this earth-centered and history-centered account, God says to each generation, whether it is burdened with the weight of factual knowledge which our own possesses, or with the misleading fantasies of the ancient religions, “Stand here, on this earth and in this present, to get the meaning of the whole. See this world as my gift and my charge to you with the sun, moon and stars as its lamps and timekeepers, and its creatures under your care.”

--Derek Kidner, Genesis, pp. 57

To the one who lives forever, for whom “one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day”, who delights in gradually working out all His purposes over time, perhaps 15 billion years is just the right amount of time to take in preparing the universe for man’s arrival and 4.5 billion years in preparing the earth.

Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, chapter 15, Creation, pp. 297

With respect to the length of days in Genesis 1, the possibility must be left open that God has chosen not to give us enough information to come to a clear decision on this question, and the real test of faithfulness to Him may be the degree to which we can act charitably toward those who in good conscience and full belief in God’s Word hold to a different position on this matter.

Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, chapter 15, Creation, pp. 297

In Genesis, the narrator only tells us that God commands the earth to bring forth life. He does not explain how that bringing forth occurs. . . The narrator of the creation account is not particularly concerned with the questions a scientist asks; rather, he wants to provide answers to the questions science cannot answer--who has created the world and for what purpose.

Bruce Waltke, Genesis, pp. 75

Hope those are helpful. The long Kidner quote is my favorite. . . .