Contradictory Creation Accounts?

Inerrancy is an unpopular doctrine in the world at large.  Advocating the complete veracity of the Bible will put on the fast track to ridicule in many circles.  Ridicule is something, however, that we need to be able to endure for the sake of Christ.  One thing that can help us stand up to ridicule is having confidence in the Scripture.  A fine way to do that is to take supposed contradictions and Biblical problems and resolve them.  With that in mind, we will take a look at an important one today.  I have been confronted with this one personally, and it is quite easy to rebut.

The small group I attend at Church has always been geared more toward intellectual things.  I do not mean to say that the others are “stupid,” but they are not as interested in covering philosophical and logical issues like we are.  As a result, visitors of an intellectual bent have occasionally stopped by.  One such man, who was a theologically liberal Christian, presented us with what he perceived to be a problematic Bible passage.

In the course of discussing creation and evolution, he said that he didn’t have any qualms about accepting evolution because the Bible had two contradictory creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis anyway.  Naturally, I opened my Bible and read both accounts.  What I found was not contradiction, but unwillingness on the part of this man to read the text charitably.

The meat of the objection has to do with the order of creation.  Did God make plants first, or did He make humans first?  The account in Genesis 1 says that the plants came first, and in Genesis two, the objector insisted, states that people did.  Read Genesis 2:4-9:

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up--for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground-- then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.  And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (ESV)

It might seem that the passage is saying, “there were no plants, then God made man, and then He made some plants.  This is where understanding the intent of the author becomes important.  Moses was setting about telling the story of the Fall of Man.  At this point chronology was not as important as it probably was in Genesis 1.  We can think of similar situations in our every day lives.

If I were to describe to you the way a particular class session at Tri-State Bible College (the school I attend) went, I could do it in a couple of ways.  One would be the chronological way.  I could say, “first we had chapel, then we discussed the book of Genesis, then we went home.”  Alternately, I could say, “we discussed the book of Genesis today.  We also had chapel and such and such a person spoke.”  In this instance chronology is not important.  I am simple recounting events.

It is also helpful to understand exactly what “bush of the field” and “small plant of the field” mean.  According to the study notes on Genesis 2:5 in the Reformation Study Bible, the “bush of the field” referred to “inedible growth, such as thorns.”  The “small plant of the field” referred to “cultivated grains.”  This is a way of establishing the pre-fall context and the antiquity of the events.  These two terms do not cover plants comprehensively.  If you take an old earth perspective, you can also acknowledge that the “then” at the beginning of verse 7 does not indicate that the two events happened in one immediately after the other.

Once again it becomes apparent that a careful reading of the Bible yields a harmonious result.  Our confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture should be growing by leaps and bounds by now, and it will only grow more as we deal with other objections to the Bible and Christianity.