No one who has taken the Bible seriously and who knows it to be the inspired Word of God can believe the world to have begun with a Big Bang.1Big Bang cosmology is an evolutionary philosophy of the creation of the universe which asserts that the entire cosmos began about 14 billion years ago (ed.). Attempts are made to profess faith in the Big Bang, as an event which can be believed along with the biblical account of creation in Genesis. “Why can we not believe both the Genesis account and the Big Bang to be true?” it is asked.
The answer to this question is very clear. It is because those who attempt to explain Genesis by the Big Bang are doing something which God seriously disapproves of. This disapproval is found in the last few verses of the Bible, where God tells us that we must never add to the Bible nor take away from it (Rev. 22:18-19). If we add to the Bible, God threatens to add to us the plagues referred to in the Bible. If we take away from the Bible, God will take away our part out of his book of life. This must, in either case, mean that we shall be shut out of heaven and suffer eternal punishment. No one who takes the Bible seriously would dare to risk this.
Reasons why the Genesis Account is Disliked
Why are people not happy to accept the Genesis account of creation? The Bible tells us why people reject it. It is because no one can understand spiritual truths until they have undergone the spiritual change which is called the new birth. The Lord Jesus Christ puts it very clearly, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).
Christ here teaches that the truths of God are foolishness to us, until we have had the experience of religious conversion. So a person who is not born again is unable to believe in the great truths of the Bible: Creation, Salvation, Heaven or hell. The unbeliever does not take any of these things seriously. To the unbeliever, the Bible is not something to be taken seriously. The result is that the Genesis account of creation is treated by the unbeliever as little more than a nice fairy story.
Sadly, the person who is not born again has no wish to know, or to believe in, God. Everybody, the Bible teaches, is aware of the existence of God. But nobody without grace wants to believe in the true God: “When they knew God, they glorified him not as God” (Romans 1:21). No unbeliever welcomes the thought of God, even though he knows full well in his heart that God exists. This is the result of sin in the heart. There is no cure for this hatred of God, except the change which religious conversion (the new birth) produces in man.
As soon as a person is born again, he, or she, knows the Bible to be the Word of God in all that it reveals to us: Creation, Redemption, and future Judgement.
Creation in Six Days
Why should we insist on interpreting the six days of Creation literally? It is because days of the week, all through history, have been twenty-four-hour days. So why should we give any other interpretation to the six days of Creation?
The Sabbath day, the day on which God rested from his work of Creation, is given to man to rest from his daily work and to worship God. In the Old Testament era, the Sabbath was the last day of the week. Since Christ’s resurrection, the Sabbath is the first day of the week. But all throughout history, the Sabbath has been a day, not a century, or a millennium.
If the days of Creation are interpreted to be millions of years, then the Bible’s record of human history is made to seem false. The number of years from Adam to Christ is approximately four thousand. God gives us the ages of the patriarchs and enables us to work out the approximate length of time therefore of the Old Testament era. We all know that the period from Christ to the present day is about two thousand years. So the history of the universe, going by the Bible’s teaching, is approximately six thousand years.
It is an offence to God’s divine revelation to alter the age of the universe from about six thousand to many billions of years.
Setting Aside God’s Word
What is the reason why the Bible, which is God’s inspired word, should in our day and age, be so carelessly and irreverently interpreted? In a word, it is because fallible human wisdom has been pushed to the front of men’s minds, and God’s infallible wisdom has been pushed into the background. The customary word used to explain this is liberalism. The Bible is, by those who believe in this liberal attitude to the Bible, interpreted to be fallible, imperfect, and in need of being improved on by human scholarship.
But such an attitude is highly displeasing to God and very harmful to human beings. Jesus Christ always speaks of the Bible as God’s infallible Word, which “cannot be broken” (John 10:35).
The Apostle Paul gives us a very important warning. He tells us that in these New Testament times, there will be “scoffers,” who treat the things of God with scorn and contempt. This is a warning to us all in these days in which we are living. The great lesson is to understand the Bible as taught by Christ and his apostles. They tell us very clearly, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3:16); “No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the scripture came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 1:20-21).
The duty of all who read God’s account of Creation in Genesis, is to take the words as God’s Spirit gives them to us. God speaks of six “days” of Creation. No one has the right to interpret the inspired narrative to mean that the world “evolved in millions of years of time”. There is no permission given to anyone to explain the origin of the universe as the result of a Big Bang.
Does the Bible Refer to any Big Bang?
Yes, it does. But the Big Bang which God tells us about has not happened in the history of the world as yet. When will this Big Bang occur? At the end of the world, when the Lord Jesus Christ returns, he will put an end to time. He will raise the dead, so that they may be judged for the way they have lived on earth. And Christ will destroy the whole universe with fire, so as to create a new universe in which there shall be no more sin or wickedness.
So the big bang is not to be sought at the start of the world’s history, but at the end of it. Christ will come back to judge all mankind. Paul tells us, “The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God” (1 Thess. 4:16). Christ himself warns us to be prepared for his second coming, “The stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken…Heaven and earth shall pass away” (Mark 13:25, 31).
In another description of his second coming, Christ says, “As the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even into the west…the sun shall be darkened…the powers of the heavens shall be shaken…he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet” (Matt. 24:27, 29, 31).
Again, Christ refers to his second coming in these words, “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars: and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring” (Luke 21:25). There will be a Big Bang in heaven and earth when Jesus comes again to end time and to renew the universe.
The lesson for us all is very clear. By all means, believe in a Big Bang. But be clear. The Big Bang did not happen at the beginning of history, rather, it will happen at the end of history. So let us all repent and believe the gospel.
Footnotes
- 1Big Bang cosmology is an evolutionary philosophy of the creation of the universe which asserts that the entire cosmos began about 14 billion years ago (ed.). ↩︎
