Did Jesus Teach Recent Creation?
by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D. *
Editor’s note: Despite the decade since this article’s initial publication, its timeless message stands: Perhaps the single most important reason to believe in recent creation is the fact that Jesus Christ believed in it.
Most everyone has been taught all through their school years that the earth, life, animals, and man have all been developing from primordial beginnings over billions of years of natural evolution. Many have tried to “baptize” this process, so to speak, by calling it “theistic evolution” or “progressive creation,” saying that God may have used evolution as His process of creation.
Because of this ubiquitous indoctrination, even many evangelical Christians have felt they must conform to this evolutionary worldview, especially in relation to the so-called deep time that is so essential to evolutionism. One respected leader of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, for example, recently wrote to me that he would prefer to believe in a young earth but that science had proved the earth was very old, so he had to go with science. Two other leaders of this ID movement told me personally on two separate occasions that they could not even afford to listen to my arguments for a young earth because they were afraid they would be convinced and that this would halt their opportunities to speak to college groups and others about Intelligent Design.
So I have written this brief article to show once again that the Lord Jesus Himself believes in recent creation and the young earth. Assuming that a Christian is a person who believes in the deity and inerrant authority of Christ, it would seem that this fact alone should be sufficient to convince him.
What I will do here, therefore, is list three key reasons for concluding that our Lord Jesus Christ believed and taught literal recent creation of all things essentially instantaneously by the omnipotent command of God, who “spoke, and it was done” (Psalm 33:9).
1. The Bible nowhere allows for long ages.
One can search the Scriptures (see my book Biblical Creationism for proof) from beginning to end without finding even a hint of evolution or long ages. To Jesus, every “jot or one tittle” of Scripture was divinely inspired (Matthew 5:18), and He warned us severely against adding any other words to it (Revelation 22:18). The Bible, therefore, would certainly not leave the vital doctrine of creation open to human speculation.
2. The Bible explicitly states how and when creation took place.
Although many evangelicals have long equivocated as to the meaning of the “days” of creation, this type of ad hoc handling of Scripture is never justified in the context, and Christ Himself would never have interpreted them as indefinite ages of some kind. Not only is “day” (Hebrew yom) defined in this context the first time it is used (Genesis 1:5), but the writer conclusively restricted its interpretation to the literal meaning by numbering the days (“first day,” “second day,” etc.) and by indicating their boundaries (“evening and morning”), both of which restrictions elsewhere in the Old Testament limit the meaning to literal days. The question seems to be even more firmly settled when God wrote with His own finger that “in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the [seventh] day and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:11), thereby basing our calendar’s seven-day week on this primeval creation week. Jesus referred to this divine example when He said that “the Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27) to meet our weekly need of rest from work.
3. The Lord Jesus recognized that men and women existed right from the beginning.
The current opinion is that the cosmos evolved about 16 billion years ago, the earth about 4.6 billion, primitive life perhaps two billion, and human life about one million years ago. The Lord Jesus, on the other hand (who was there, having Himself created all things—note John 1:1-3), taught that men and women were made essentially at the same time as the cosmos itself when He said that “from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female’” (Mark 10:6). “The beginning” obviously was a reference to Genesis 1:1, and Christ was specifically citing Genesis 1:27.
On another occasion, speaking especially of Adam’s son Abel, He referred to “the blood of all the prophets which was shed from the foundation of the world” (Luke 11:50-51), thereby acknowledging that Abel was the first prophet, martyred in the very first generation—not 4.6 billion years after the formation of the earth. Jesus also said that Satan, using Cain to slay Abel, “was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44).
Note also that the father of John the Baptist, prophesying when filled with the Holy Spirit, said that God’s holy prophets had been predicting a coming Savior “since the world began” (Luke 1:70). Then the apostle Peter later preached that the second coming of Christ and the ultimate removal of the great Curse on the earth had even been events that “God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began” (Acts 3:21). The apostle Paul wrote that evidence of God as Creator should have been “clearly seen” (by men, of course) ever since “the creation of the world” (Romans 1:20).
There can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus was what evolutionists today (both theistic and atheistic) would call a “young-earth creationist.” It would seem that this should settle the question for all true Christians,
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