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The Barrier to Adding Long Ages to the Bible

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For centuries, people took the Bible as written. This includes a literal six-day recent creation. For some reason, many decided to give secular science views preeminence over Scripture. Some rejected the Bible outright, others had a pretense of belief with a modified view.

Something I cannot understand is why such people essentially tell God what he says and means about creation week. Do they prefer the applause of atheists for their compromises on recent creation? Some are essentially Deists, adding not only billions of years, but evolution to their pusillanimous religion.

Some professing Christians will argue like atheists when shown that their efforts to add long ages to the Bible are easily refuted by one verse, Exodus 20:11.
Ten Commandments section of Bible image, Unsplash  Tim Wildsmith (modified)
To be blunt, sometimes when professing Christians are particularly enamored with a faulty belief, they reason like atheists. F'rinstance, the Hebrew word yom does not always mean a literal day. Although it is used with what I call qualifiers in creation week that clearly indicate that those are literal days, some folks find when the word means indefinite period of time. Therefore, Genesis 1 can mean whatever they want it to mean. Also, they ignore the fact that if God had meant the passages to mean long periods of time, he would have used words with that meaning. This behavior is absurd and leads to bad hermeneutics.

There are several prominent apologists who use eisegesis (adding into the meaning of the text) instead of using proper exegesis (taking the true meaning as found in Scripture). Frankly, (mind if I call you Frank?) when they do this to the Scriptures that they claim to believe, I wonder what other things they are teaching that may be unreliable. One famous preacher made a point at the beginning of a sermon to say that they days of creation were not literal. I stopped listening to him.

What is worse is when some Christians are caught by Exodus 20:11, which clearly states that creation happened in one week, they will come up with vapid rescuing devices — like atheists. Why? Yeah, I know, I asked before, but who do they really want to please, God or men? It also seems they ignore Exodus 31:16-18 or assign an esoteric meaning to it.
Over the last two hundred years, many outstanding Bible scholars who have done much good for the church have tried to find a way to fit millions of years into the Bible. Prior to the early nineteenth century, the almost universal belief among Bible-believing Christians was that God created the world in six literal days about 6,000 years ago and destroyed the earth with a global flood at the time of Noah.

It would be well worth your time to dig into the rest of this at "Exodus 20:11—An Insurmountable Stone Wall Against Adding Millions of Years to the Bible."