Here's the link again:
https://yeshuaspeople.com/tonghamcf/sermon/6-8-23-in-the-beginning-god-created-all-things/
Now,
leading Creationist Jonathon Sarfati of Creation Ministries International wrote this superb article:
Genesis is history!
by
Jonathan Sarfati
Our ministry supports the authority of the Bible from the very first verse. However, some opponents of biblical (‘young earth’) creation also claim to believe in the authority of Scripture, but claim that
Genesis 1–11
is poetry or allegory. Others rebuke us by claiming, “Genesis is not a scientific textbook”. If I’m in a playful mood, I’ll reply, “Thank goodness, because scientific textbooks become outdated in a few years”. Otherwise I reply that we claim it’s really a book about
history—events that really happened in the past.1
To justify this, it’s important to show what
type
of book Genesis is.2
To do this, we should compare Scripture with Scripture.
Other biblical writers treat Genesis as history
Hebrew scholar Dr Steven Boyd has shown that different types of verb (perfect and imperfect) are frequent in Hebrew poetry, but not in historical books. So from his verb analysis, he found that the probability that
Genesis 1:1–2:3
is narrative (not poetry) is 0.99997.
As we have shown in a number of articles, the rest of the Bible treats Genesis as real history.3
The other writers of the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, treat the people, events, time frames,4
and even the order of events, as real, not merely literary or theological devices.5
And the reality of the history is foundational to crucial teachings about faith and morality.6
Furthermore, it’s clear that the New Testament authors
presupposed
that their readers, as new converts in the first churches, received detailed instruction in Genesis.7
What does biblical history look like?
Let’s ask opponents the question: just suppose, for the purposes of the argument, Genesis is history, how would you expect it to look? We can answer from the style of the undisputed historical books such as most of Exodus, Joshua, Judges, etc.
Hebrew grammar experts have shown that historical narratives in the Old Testament have a very distinctive verb pattern. They start with a type of verb called a
qatal
(perfect) and continue with another type of verb called the
waw
(vav,8
ו) consecutives, or
wayyiqtols.9
This verb type is frequent in the historical books of the Old Testament.
Apply this to
Genesis 1, the first verb,
ברא
bārā’
(create), is
qatal, while the subsequent verbs that move the narrative forward are wayyiqtols (ויאמר
wāyyō’mer
(‘and … said’),
ויהי
wāyehi
(‘and there was’),
וירא
wāyyāre (‘and … saw’). Thus this has
just the pattern one
would expect from a historical narrative.
Furthermore,
Genesis 1–11
moves seamlessly on, with no change in style, to
Genesis 12–50. No one doubts that the latter is intended to be read as history. Therefore any doubts with the former don’t stem from the grammar and style of the text itself. Rather, they come from considerations
outside
the text, such as long-age uniformitarian geology and evolutionary biology
