If everything was created by God in six days, did my my soul exist prior to my birth?
Questions Listed Under Creation
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The Bible does not teach a pre-existence—the idea that our souls had an independent existence apart from our bodies before our birth (See Genesis 5:3, Psalm 51:5, and Romans 5:12). Lutheran theologians have sometimes debated whether each soul is a new creation from God, or whether you get your soul from God through your parents, just like your body. It's not a question Scripture answers directly, but the latter view seems to fit better with what Scripture does say.
"The immortality of the soul" isn't the way Christians prefer to express what we believe. Although souls don't cease to exist when their time on earth is finished, they can in fact die. Hell is nothing other than an unending, "living death."
Depending on exactly what is meant by the phrase, we'd also be uncomfortable with saying that our bodies are "merely shells for our spirit." In the beginning God didn't create disembodied souls and then form bodies to put them into. He did exactly the reverse—forming a body from the ground, and then breathing life into it (Genesis 2:7). At the end, there will be a resurrection of all the dead (Daniel 12:2) and a complete transformation of those believers who are still living (1 Corinthians 15:50-54). We are not going to live eternally as disembodied spirits, but as complete human beings—with body and soul together again.
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In Genesis we are taught creation was done in six days and on the seventh day God rested. We are taught that a day is from sundown to sundown (24 hours). However, in 2 Peter 3:8 Peter tells us that to God a day can be one thousand years or one thousand years a day. Can this be construed to mean creation may have taken several thousand years? Where do we get the determination that the reference to day in Genesis is the normal 24 hour period?
The text of Genesis specifically says that each day of creation was from evening to morning, or a period of darkness followed by a period of light.
Peter is saying nothing about the days of creation. He is saying that time is irrelevant to God. God could have created the world in no time at all. The days of the account in Genesis are days to us, not days to God. They are the pattern for our week.
Even if the days were millions of years, this would solve nothing of the conflict with evolution since the creation account specifically excludes evolution from one kind to another. The only honest way to hold to evolution is simply to reject the creation account and not attempt to make it say something it cannot say.
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Does the Bible say anything about Lilith? Is there any doubt that Eve was the first woman God created? I recently saw a documentary that tried to show that the Bible had two different accounts of creation and that Christians accept that there was another woman before Eve, named "Lilith."
The word "lilith" appears in the Scriptues only in Isaiah 34:14, where it probably refers to a species of bird (NIV translation: "night creatures"), although a demon named Lilith does appear very early in the literature of Mesopotamia. A supposed connection between "lilith" and the Hebrew word for "night" underlies the RSV's translation "night hag" in the Isaiah passage, and it gave birth to all kinds of scary legends about the demoness Lilith in post-biblical literature. Some of these legends are reflected in the Talmud.
You're referring to the legend that Lilith was Adam's first wife who was created, not from him, but simultaneously. The legend states that when Lilith refused to accept a subordinate sexual role, she was banished, and God replaced her with Eve whose creation from Adam resulted in a more harmonious marriage.
This lurid story seems to have begun with a 17th-century commentary on the Talmud. Today radical feminists are fascinated with Lilith for obvious reasons. But the story of Lilith has no basis whatsoever in Scripture or in fact.
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I was reading in Genesis the account of Cain's exile. He was sent to the Land Of Nod (or "wandering" in Hebrew) where he later married and had a son named Enoch. So my questions are where did the wife come come from? Is she an unmentioned child of Adam and Eve? Or, did God create more people after them to help populate the Earth? Another somewhat related question is how did we get different races and nationalities? Was it from adaptation or other people?
All human beings who have ever lived are descendants of Adam and Eve (See Romans 5:12 and Acts 17:26). This includes Cain's eventual wife.
Among other things, this Scriptural truth explains why we human beings are vastly more alike than we are different. It has been interesting to see even the unbelieving world coming to much the same conclusion. You might be interested in the information on the whole notion of "race" that you'll find here:
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Could the World have been created in more than seven days because days lasted longer than 24 hours? Also, could the big bang theory be correct if God caused it?
Read on its own terms, the account in Genesis 1 makes it clear that each of the six "days" of creation was just that--a normal cycle of the clock with a period of darkness and a period of light. See also Exodus 20:9-11.
The "Big Bang" refers to a scientific theory that says that the universe began around 13 billion years ago. According to this theory, initially all the matter/energy in the universe was concentrated in one hot, dense mass, which then exploded and has been expanding ever since.
The theory does allow that the universe had a "beginning" of sorts, but that is about the only thing that it has in common with the biblical account of creation. The two really can't be reconciled.
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How can you explain to an unbeliever that Adam and Eve and their offspring, through incest, populated the earth, when such a thing leads to developmental and physical problems?
In the beginning, when God created all things, he could have made dozens of couples to populate the world if he had chosen to do so, but he did not. He made us all from one (Genesis 1:27, Acts 17:26). Significantly, God also saved all people through one person, Jesus Christ (Romans 5:12-21).
The question you ask or that you are being asked by others mistakenly exports the concept of incest back to the beginning when it did not apply. In fact, as late as the time of the patriarch Abraham, who lived long after Adam (see the geneologies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 10-11), marriage with sisters or half-sisters was done (Genesis 20:12). It was only later still, at the time of Moses, that this became against the law (Leviticus 18).
We do not know when or how diversity in reproduction became beneficial and began to safeguard against developmental problems. We have no information about this.
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