As promised, I wanted to provide a few more thoughts on why I hold to the Framework view, partly in response to questions I’ve received, and partly because of other clarifying thoughts that I hope will be helpful.

Two of the strengths of the 24 hour, 7 day view of the Genesis account are as follows:

1.    It seems to be the most straightforward reading of the passage, particularly with the use of the word “day”, and the phrase “there was evening and morning, the ___ day.”  That would make it appear that the most natural reading of this text is to take it as normal 24 hour days.
2.    The fourth commandment in Exodus 20 says that we are to observe the Sabbath because in 6 days God created the heavens and the earth and rested on the 7th day, and therefore establishes that those 6 days were more than just literary devices.

These are significant, thoughtful objections, and therefore I have no hesitation to uphold and respect those who take this position.

But upon consideration, I think these objections can be satisfied by a closer examination of the passages mentioned, so I’ll give brief responses to them.  You may or may not find them satisfactory, but hopefully they will demonstrate further why we should be charitable with those who disagree.

For objection 1, I think that Augustine is right in his observation that because the concept of evening and morning is based on a 24 hour solar/lunar cycle, it seems to me that the first 3 days were not ordinary, normal 24 hour days, because there was no sun or moon to govern until the 4th day?  So without the sun, it seems to me that we are talking about unusual “days” from the start, especially for the first 3 days until the sun was created.  I also don’t believe that a 15th century BC Israelite reading Moses’ account of creation would read it as such; there’s no natural light apart from the sun in the Jewish mind, so to divorce the light from the sun in days 1 and 4 I believe would have been an important clue to the original recipients that the days of Genesis 1 were only intended as a framework.  Finally, if God called the light good on day 1, why would he have to then replace his good creation to make way for a different source of light a few days later?

For the second objection, I would draw your attention to the fact that Ex. 20 says that God “rested”.  You can see part of the problem in English, and you can see even more of the problem if you study the Hebrew grammar.  The word translated “rested” appears only 3 times in this particular form of the word (Hebrew “niphal” form), and the other two times (Ex. 31:17 and 2 Samuel 16:14), which help us to determine the meaning in Exodus 20, the word carries the sense of needing to be refreshed and resting from being wearied by hard work.  In Genesis 2 we are told that God “finished”, but here it says he actually refreshed himself.

So this creates a theological dilemma:  Did God need to rest?  Was he tired from creation, in need of refreshing?  No.  Isaiah 40:28 proclaims that the God of creation does not grow weary!  So we have to take God’s resting figuratively, not literally.  And yet, our rest has to be literal.  But if God’s resting is figurative and our resting literal, then we are justified in saying God’s creating in 6 days is figurative (a literary Framework), while our week is a literal 7 days. So for me, this passage strengthens why we should take the days as non-literal days.

I came to hold this position because of my love for God’s Word, and an awareness that there were things that appeared to be problematic to me in trying to harmonize the accounts of Genesis 1 and 2.  It seems to me that we would have to jump to great lengths in order to harmonize them apart from the framework view, and I don’t think God through Moses would have intended for us to do so.  Remember, Moses is not writing as a scientist; he’s writing as a prophet and a theologian.  He wants his people to believe in Yahweh as creator, and not fear the false gods and the peoples of Canaan before they enter the promised land.  

One question that I received was a suggestion that maybe Genesis 2:5 was only talking about how there was no vegetation in the garden yet, but there was elsewhere.  But that doesn’t account for the description of 2:5 says that there was “no bush” and “no small plant” – that is a merism, a literary device that uses two categories as an expression of the whole (“heaven and earth” for example is a merism for all of the cosmos, whereas this is a merism for all vegetation).  But the even bigger problem is that it says there was no bush or plant “in the land”.  Your English translation can be confusing here; “land” is the same word as “earth”.  There were no plants on the earth!

Further, a question came because verse 6 says “and a mist was coming up from the earth” with the suggestion that God was watering the earth with something other than rain. Again, I’m not sure the translators have captured this.  The commentators I’ve read suggest (and this seems contextually quite obvious to me) that verse 6 is how God corrected the two problems identified in verse 5. There was a) no rain and b) no man.  So in verse 6, this problem is solved when God a) causes a mist (elsewhere translated “rain cloud” to rise up and b) creates man.  Verse 6 then doesn’t say that there was already mist addressing the problem of rain (the “and” can be confusing, as it can also be translated “but” which you’ll see in several translations).  Rather it is describing the way that God alleviated the problem of no rain: he formed a rain cloud.

I’m aware that some of the creation science researchers have proposed a theory about a canopy being the mist that is referred to here, and that canopy remained until the flood. The suggestion is that there is no need for rain for those thousands of years between creation and flood because of higher atmospheric pressure.  Beyond the fact that it is pure speculation, and I don’t think even the theory of it being possible for this canopy to sustain the moisture needed for vegetation to exist in the land (as Gen 2:5 says is necessary) would be accepted in scientific circles, there simply isn’t textual support for this.  To arrive at this conclusion, I believe you have to read your science into the text, and if you remember why Moses is writing this, I think you’ll see why that’s not an appropriate way to take this text.  Further, it seems highly unlikely that anyone in Moses’ day would have read Gen 1 and 2 and thought that there had been a canopy and no rain up until the flood.  

For deeper development and insight of my comments on Genesis 2:5 and how they pose a problem for the traditional view, I’d recommend an article by my professor at RTS-Orlando, Mark Futato.  Mark translated the book of Psalms for the New Living Translation, and has significantly shaped my understanding of how to read and understand the Old Testament.  You can read his article here.  For those who are interested in interacting further with the arguments for each of the positions, please check out the book that we recommended, “The Genesis Debate” which you can order here or pick up at the church book store. Hope this helps!