The Age of The Earth and Universe Revisited

Back in January of 2015, I released a blog post titled Just How Old Is The Earth & Universe?, where I showed that when you add together the genealogies and time-spans presented by scripture, you come up with an Earth and Universe that are 5,909 years old.  Something that I didn't say in the article (but that I told people who I shared the article with) was that I was not sure that I had found every possible genealogy and time span in scripture, and that I was open to amending what I had previously written.  Lo and behold, I recently found out while sitting in church that I had missed a couple hundred years in scripture.

What I am going to do in this article is I am going to lay out the scriptures I used in the blog post mentioned above, and I am going to add the missing data, which will be written in bold to make it obvious what was missing before.  With that being said, let's get this party started.

How Old Does The Bible Say That The Earth & Universe Are?

As we all know, God created Adam on the sixth day of creation.  When Adam was 130, he had a son named Seth (Genesis 5:3).  When Seth was 105, he had a son named Enosh (Genesis 5:6).  When Enosh was 90, he had a son named Kenan (Genesis 5:9).  When Kenan was 70, he had a son named Mahalalel (Genesis 5:12).  When Mahalalel was 65, he had a son named Jared (Genesis 5:15).  When Jared was 162, he had a son named Enoch (Genesis 5:18).  When Enoch was 65, he had a son named Methuselah (Genesis 5:21).  When Methuselah was 187, he had a son named Lamech (Genesis 5:25).  When Lamech was 182, he had Noah (Genesis 5:28).  When Noah was 500, he had sons named Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Genesis 5:32).

Noah was 600 years old when the Flood happened (Genesis 6:6), which means that 100 years had passed between when God warned him about it, and when it actually happened.  According to Genesis 8:13, Noah was 601 when the water from the flood had completely receeded.  According to Genesis 11:10, Shem became the father of Arphaxad two years after the flood.  When Arphaxad was 35, he became the father of Shelah (Genesis 11:12).  When Shelah was 30, he had a son named Eber (Genesis 11:14).  When Eber was 34, he had a son named Peleg (Genesis 11:16).  When Peleg was 30, he had a son named Reu (Genesis 11:18).  When Reu was 32, he had a son named Serug (Genesis 11:20).  When Serug was 30, he had a son named Nahor (Genesis 11:22).  When Nahor was 29, he had a son named Terah (Genesis 11:24).  When Terah was 70, he had Abram, Nahor (a different one), and Haran (Genesis 11:26).  When Abram was 100, he had Isaac (Genesis 21:5).  When Isaac was 60 years old, Jacob and Esau were born (Genesis 25:24-26).  When Jacob was 130 years old, he and the rest of the Israelites moved to the region of Goshen in Egpyt (Genesis 47:27-28).

In Exodus 12:40, we read the following:

“Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years.”

In other words, 430 years passed between Jacob and the Israelites moving to Egypt, and the actual Exodus from Egypt.

In 1 Kings 6:1, we read the following:

“In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites came out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, the second month, he began to build the temple of the Lord.”

In other words, the Exodus to the fourth year of King Solomon’s reign was 480 years.

The fourth year of King Solomon’s reign was 966 BC, and the book of Malachi was written shortly after 433 BC, so that’s a span of 533 years.

The time between the book of Malachi and the birth of Jesus was from 433-5 BC, a span of 428 years.

Luke 3:23 says that Jesus was 30 years old when he began his ministry, and we know from studying the Gospels that Jesus' ministry lasted three years, so Jesus was 33 when he was crucified, rose from the dead, and ascended into Heaven.

Since this is the year 2016, that would mean that 1,983 years have passed since Jesus ascended to heaven.

When you add all that up, we find that the universe and the Earth are both 6,126 years old.  Most Young Earth Creationists round it down to 6,000 years in order to make it simple for the sake of argumentation.

Conclusion

As we can see, even students of the Bible like myself can make mistakes or miss key pieces of information when dealing with a subject that requires as much careful reading and digging as this one did.  It took me 23 months after the initial blog post to figure out that I had missed some crucial information.  At this point, I am pretty sure that I actually have all the different genealogies and time spans provided by scripture, but if you find in your study of scripture that I missed something, please let me know.

With all that being said, all that the missing 217 years did was raise the age of the Earth and Universe of my previous post from being a little under 6,000 years to a little over 6,000 years.  In fact, the missing 217 years shows that there are absolutely ZERO gaps in the time-span between Adam's creation and the birth of Jesus; this is why those in the church who oppose the clear Biblical teaching of a 6,000-year-old Earth and universe (namely Old Earth Creationists) are forced to try and insert their billions-of-years belief into the creation account contained in Genesis 1:1-2:3.

To see why the Old Earth Creationist's attempts to fit billions of years into the creation account absolutely fails, watch my recent podcast with Jay Hall below:

In the meantime, while I go to work preparing for my January 22, 2017 presentation at the Institute for Creation Science, and while I work on other projects related to other apologetics topics, I will try to post another written blog post on here before the end of the year.  The subject of my next written post will be about false claims that Frank Turek made in September regarding Paul and Jesus not assuming the authority of scripture in their conversations with Gentiles. 

Until next time, God bless.