Our Really Quite Young But Very Old Earth

Christ's Miracle at the Wedding of Cana and How It May Tie into the Age of the World

The Wedding Feast at Cana, 1563, Paolo Veronese

Growing up in the Church, one of the more perplexing questions I continually ran into was: “How old is the Earth?” Most of my teachers taught what can only be defined as a very fundamentalist understanding. That meant that I was raised to think that the entirety of the fields of archeology, geology, biology and so on were flawed at a foundational level and had fallen into error a very long time ago. In essence, at some undetermined point in the past, Satan and his forces had infiltrated ranks of the world’s top scientists and had made it their mission to ensure that the sciences themselves rebelled against God and obfuscated the truth. Luckily, our lord and savior Ken Ham was born and, through his ministry Answers in Genesis, he bravely and deftly began to guide society back towards the only true way to comprehend our scripture, and our created world and its timeline.

At first I bought into all of it because who wouldn’t? When you are a child, your mind is malleable and you are raised to trust your elders and their authority, so who are you to sinfully question things? You aren’t old enough to legally drink, smoke, or vote. Much less are you qualified—or even able—to ask your teacher to march out the premise that the sciences are compromised to its logical conclusion. If we questioned so much of the “established” science, would we be creating a proverbial baby-with-the-bathwater situation where it was inherently necessary to questioning every conclusion that was arrived at using similar methodology? And what do we make of the waters above and waters below; the Ancient Israeli belief in the firmament as it is presented in Genesis 1? Is a complete restructuring of our current cosmology to instead reflect the ideas present before space stations, satellites, and the telescope now absolutely mandatory?

These questions gradually gained more and more traction in my mind as I went through high-school and began college. As I aged I found myself getting exposed to “Old Earth” material, and not just from secular sources but from theologically sound, Bible-believing Christians. And, what do you know, a lot of it made sense! The expansion of the universe. Lightyears. Tectonic plate movement. All concepts and realities that previously had to effectively be waved away as “kinda true but inaccurate” now had seemingly reliable explanations. For a long while, then, I became a staunch Old Earth Creationist, and I went so far as to embrace a lot of what is termed “Theistic Evolution” which is the belief that God used evolution to accomplish His ends. In other words: evolution was not some random process but rather the guided effort of the Triune God. Francis Collins’ BioLogos was an influential mainstay during that period of my life. As were the works of Hugh Ross and William Lane Craig’s ministry Reasonable Faith.

After a time, however, there started to be some holes in that way of thinking. Or, perhaps not holes, but moments of pause. Things that made you think “but what about…” at a frequency that was a little less than comfortable. It was startling to me how many times a historical Adam was called into question, same with how common it was for the flood account in Genesis to be presented as local rather than global. With the former, I wondered how it could account for the references to Adam in Christ’s genealogy (Luke 3:38) and in Paul’s letters (Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15) where Adam is discussed as a literally real, historical person. And with the latter I wondered how the local flood theory intelligently rationalized the presence of numerous flood narratives within various cultures across multiple continents. Did it make sense that Native American, Egyptian, Jewish, Hindu, Akkadian, and Mesopotamian people all had separate flood histories? Or did it make more sense that all these stories were an accounting of the same incident? And speaking of consistent themes and accounts that are present amidst a multitude of different cultures, there is a really interesting conversation to be had about the existence of dragons; but that is for another time.

Anyways, I wrestled with these inconsistencies and I started to think about whether or not the Young Earth Creationists (YEC) had it right this whole time since their view seemingly had less hermeneutical hoops to jump through when it came to reading Scripture and taking it at face value. But try as I might I could not escape the feeling that they were going too far by questioning everything and virtually making claims that unless you were a YEC you were outside of Biblical orthodoxy and, accordingly, heretical. There are plenty of Christians who believed in Holy Scripture and the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—the only begotten Son of God and member of the Trinity—and who also had different interpretative ideas on how the creation narrative could be read. It plainly is more nonsensical to claim that they are all false believers than it is to say that it is okay to have different ideas on how to interpret the creation account. Nonetheless, I was at a lengthy impasse with how to juggle the different perspectives on creation. Until recently, honestly. And maybe I am still at that impasse, time will tell, but in the meantime there is something I want to propose: What if both the Young Earth Creationists and the Old Earth Creationists are right? What if rather than this being an either/or situation it is in actuality a both/and?

I think that Christ’s miracle of the Wedding of Cana is key to this conversation and what I am proposing. We can read the whole account in John 2:1-11 but the long and short of it is that Christ is at a wedding, the wedding runs out of wine, and then Christ turns some water into wine and it is the really good stuff. Now, for those unfamiliar with the wine process, you don’t just end up with good wine out of nowhere. If you wanted to make wine, be it white or red, the fermentation process takes weeks, at minimum. For the very best wines, you want that fermentation and aging process to go on a lot longer than that—months, a year, decades even. So, when Christ made wine that the master of the feast declares as “good” I can only assume that a basic reading of the text means what it says: that the wine was truly good. And, knowing that good wine only comes with age, only one conclusion follows: that the wine, which was made in the blink of an eye through the miraculous work of our Lord, was also old. Created in seconds, not previously existing, yet simultaneously an aged, delicious wine.

Real quick on a related note: A counter to this proposal is one which claims that the wine at the wedding feast was not truly wine. Thus there was nothing to “age” because the wine was in essence simply grape juice with zero alcohol present. Such a claim also holds to the idea that wine in the Bible in general is not wine as we know it. In fact, I have heard it explicitly preached from the pulpit that “wine in the Bible contains no alcohol and anyone who tells you differently is a false teacher trying to get you to sin.” Unfortunately, I am not kidding. Hopefully, such a counter and such a claim is obviously understood as ridiculous. In a sense, it is also very dangerous, as it utilizes the same type of dishonest trickery dressed up as reasoning which people use to say that the Bible doesn’t say what it clearly says regarding marriage, the sanctity of life, Christ’s divinity, and on. This counter also contains a clearly inconsistent handling of Holy Scripture as there are multiple warnings against drunkenness throughout the Bible, yet all warnings are nonsense at the onset if the wine being addressed was non-alcoholic. Preston Sprinkle has a great write-up addressing claims that wine in the Bible was non-alcoholic, as well as other related ideas, which can be found here. I know Preston Sprinkle can be a relatively controversial figure at times so here is another article on the same topic from a Reformed Baptist perspective as well. But I digress. Now, back to my main point.

If Jesus Christ—fully God and fully man, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, being in one being with the Father, and being the one through whom all things were made—created aged wine in a split-second, could God not also have created an aged Earth across six days? Why could it not be true that from a measurable standpoint the Earth was millions or billions of years old while also only having been in existence for 10,000 years or less? A similar comparison to the miracle at the Wedding of Cana is that within the creation narrative Adam and Eve are clearly aged people, not infants, when God brings them into being. Their appearance would have been of those who are aged twenty, thirty, or forty something years. Whichever age is ideal, really.

This stance allows for the text to be read appropriately while also allowing for the sciences to remain relatively accurate as well. This is not to say that none of the science behind our carbon dating and other such things needs to change, it very well may need to be adjusted, but now the entirety of the scientific advancements made since the Enlightenment don’t need to be ignored or credited to demonic interference.

I found one article on Ken Ham’s website that somewhat addresses my proposal and that can be read here if you feel so inclined. Ultimately, although I do think their attempt at a response is commendable, their answers are unconvincing. They throw up the objection that “if the Earth was created aged then God is deceitful” to which I would simply respond with “how is God deceitful if He gave us the Bible?” Holy Scripture makes clear from page one that God created the Heavens and the Earth. God is not coy about that fact. Scripture also makes clear that he made Adam and Eve as aged beings, not children. Is it then actually deceitful of God to create in a manner which Scripture shows He can create by? And given the time in our history when older ages of the Earth began to be proposed based on measurable information (the 17th and 18th centuries), the Bible was either being taught via the Church or available to the common man, albeit at a high price. Accordingly it is not as if man was being mislead by scientific proposals in a vacuum devoid of God and His Word. If people studied stratigraphic concepts and remained ignorant of the creative potential of the Triune God that was on them, not the Lord.

Granted, all of this is the conjecture of a man with no real credibility to his name. My degrees are in English Literature and Nursing. My only experience with Theology is that which is gained in my free time and through no formal institution. And I know for a fact that I know less about the scientific world and all the hoopla therein than I know about Theology. So, take all of this with a grain of salt. Chew on it and spit it out or chew on it, enjoy it, and maybe this becomes a fun way to think about God’s creation. If you have any resources pertaining to this topic that you would like me to read or check out, please either message me directly via the appropriate channels or leave me a comment below.

Thanks for reading!