Thoughts on Revelation 12 & Isaiah 45

Today’s reading: Isaiah 45; Revelation 12

Thoughts on Revelation 12

I’m pretty sure I linked to this same podcast episode last time we read Revelation 12 in this plan, but with Christmas in only a couple days, it seemed like the perfect time to link to it again.

While we celebrate Jesus’ birth on December 25th every year, it is well known, from the biblical text itself, that this is not His actual birthday. Some of the months given in the text, such as when Gabriel visited Mary to ask if she would be willing to become the mother of the Messiah, point toward His birth actually falling in the August-September window. While that obviously doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate His birth on Christmas, can we know when He was actually born?

In episode 138 of Dr. Michael Heiser’s Naked Bible Podcast, he tries to answer exactly that question, and Revelation 12 is a big part of answering it. I personally find it completely fascinating, and it definitely gave me a new way to think about some of the passages in play.

So if you want a fascinating deep dive into the likely date/time of Jesus’ birth for Christmas, go check out that podcast episode!

Merry (slightly early) Christmas!

Thoughts on Isaiah 45

I don’t think this is something I have really talked about on this blog before, but a handful of years ago I started leaning more toward a young earth view of creation rather than an old earth view. I know some Christians make this into a live-or-die kind of issue, but it’s not honestly something I consider all that important. It has been a curiosity for me though, mainly because the biblical authors clearly assume a younger earth in many places. That said, it’s also important to make a distinction between the assumptions of the biblical authors and reality at times. I don’t mean this in such a way as would undermine the truth or authority of Scripture, but the fact of the matter is that passages like Genesis 1 are intended to communicate theology, not geology, and so the authors communicated that theology through the framework they already knew. God didn’t impart full, modern understandings of cosmology, astronomy, geology, medicine, etc. into the minds of the people He used to write the Scriptures, so we should expect to see pre-modern understandings in the background of the broader points being made without that undermining the authors’ points.

That said, a few years ago I came across this lecture on Catastrophic Plate Tectonics by Dr. Kurt Wise that I personally feel has a lot of explanatory power. It sent me down a series of rabbit holes on this question and I came out the other side having switched from assuming the earth is billions of years old to assuming it was probably created not all that long ago (10,000ish years ago maybe). But again, I don’t feel super strongly about this, or like this is a major live-or-die issue. If I get to heaven and God tells me I’m wrong about it, that will be just fine…

But anyway, the reason I bring all this up today is Isaiah’s comment about the Lord’s creation of the world in Isaiah 45. This is the kind of verse that had me questioning the age of the earth in the first place. Isaiah says, “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!)…” This isn’t a statement of cosmology from Isaiah, but one of intent. Isaiah says that God did not create the world empty, but formed it to be inhabited. If God formed the world to be inhabited, does it make as much sense that He would create the universe out of the Big Bang and let that ride for billions of years until the earth formed, and then let that earth ride for billions more years until humanity, His image bearers, finally came forth (or were specially created)? In this sense, it would make much more sense that God would either create the earth and universe largely as it is today, ready to be inhabited from the beginning, or would create it via a mechanism like the Big Bang, but accelerate natural processes to bring it quickly to a point of habitability.

Obviously this wouldn't require that the earth is young, as you could argue that if anything at all is there it is not empty, but given that Isaiah qualifies what he means by "empty" as "inhabited," and in context we are not talking about microorganisms or animals, but humans specifically, it seems pretty clear he is saying that the earth was inhabited by humans from the beginning. So a place like this, where Isaiah is making a statement of fact about the initial state of creation, coupled with a statement about the Lord's intent for creation which strongly implies He populated creation immediately, lends weight to a younger earth perspective. I would say that this verse, in isolation, is not sufficient on it's own to overturn an old-earth cosmology, but it definitely adds some weight to the young-earth side of the debate.