Five Rules for Interpreting the Bible

Five Rules for Interpreting the Bible:

1) What type of literature is the passage? The simplest division is prose or poetry.
2) What is the context of the passage? Look at what comes before and after.
3) How would the original audience have interpreted the passage?
4) Scripture interprets Scripture. The unchanging triune God wrote every word of the Bible.
5) It's all about Jesus. The Bible is relentlessly Christocentric.

Let's apply these rules to Genesis 1.

1) Genesis 1 is historical narrative or prose. Its language should therefore be taken literally rather than figuratively or symbolically. This means one cannot escape the Young Earth interpretation by calling Genesis 1 poetry. It is not poetry.

2) The immediate context of Genesis 1 is Genesis 2. Gen 2 recaps the events of Day 6 in much greater detail. Since the events of Genesis 2 do not take an age or epoch to occur, Day 6 back in chapter 1 must also not take a long period of time.

3) The Israelites wandering in the wilderness (sometime between 1446 to 1406 BC) were Moses' original intended audience for Genesis. There is no way this nation of ancient near-Eastern slaves heard Genesis 1 and thought of any of the modern fanciful interpretations (Day-Age theory, gap theory, etc.).

4) Exodus 20:11, the fourth of the ten commandments, refers back to the days of creation in Genesis 1. God says that we should work six days and rest on the seventh because that is what he did. Because Moses wrote Genesis and Exodus, and because Ex 20:11 equates the days of Gen 1 with the days of our current work week, the days of Genesis 1 must be six literal, consecutive 24-hour days.

5) If we live on a young Earth (about 6000 years old), then the way we find the planet today is not the way God made it. He did not make a world with death, decay, misery, entropy, etc. He made a world radically unlike the one we experience. But when we fell into sin, the creation (placed under our dominion) fell with us. And if the sin of the First Adam is the cause of everything that is wrong in the universe, then the obedience of the Last Adam is the solution for everything that is wrong in the universe. Young earth creationism therefore exalts the Son of God by magnifying the comprehensiveness and efficacy of his redemptive work - strong correlative support that the six days of Genesis 1 are six literal, consecutive 24-hour days.