People riding for the Long Ages brand will tell you that an old earth was accepted by people until young earth creationists rode into down. That is the opposite of the truth. People accepted recent creation until Christians and Jews began compromising with secular science. One bit of trickery that these four-flushers use is to say that the seventh day of creation week is not an actual day.
As to why some professing Christians want to cede to secularists and insist that Earth is billions of years, I suspect it's because they want to look intelligent in the eyes of secularists. The only way to get millions or billions of years out of the Bible is to shove them in there first and commence to saying, "Lookie what I found!" Not hardly! This effort to change the obvious meaning of the seventh day requires massive eisegesis and ripping verses out of context (while ignoring others altogether), but doing so also does damage to other areas of Scripture.
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| Credit: Pixabay / Kai Kalhh |
To read the entire article, click on "Is the Seventh Day 24-Hours Long?"It should be noted that God is not still working on the seventh day and that he had finished working the prior day. The seventh day was not a day of creation but a day of rest (Genesis 2:3). Thus God had finished (kala’) all his work, referring to everything in heaven and earth being completed. The words of Genesis 2:1 introduce the completion of God’s creation. The verbs “finished,” “rested,” and “blessed” indicate the uniqueness of this day. The fact that day seven, like the other days, is numbered is further evidence that it is a day of 24 hours (Genesis 2:2–3).The interpretation that day seven is not a 24-hour day because it lacks “evening and morning” misunderstands the use of this phrase throughout the creation week. Notice that in each of the first six days there is a structure, which is not mentioned on the seventh day, to shape each of the days: