Does it matter how God created woman?

God could have created woman in any way He wanted. He could have made her from the dirt like He did with Adam. He could have created her by the power of His voice like He did with the animals and plants. He didn’t create woman in these ways, though; instead, He decided to make woman in a unique way—from the rib of the man.

Genesis 2:21,22 – The Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, the Lord God took a rib and closed up the flesh where it had been. The Lord God built a woman from the rib that He had taken from the man and brought her to the man.

So why did God create woman in such a unique way? Adam understood. God did this to show a unique relationship that existed between man and woman. Adam said, “She shall be called ‘woman,” because she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23).

By creating woman out of man, God revealed an order to His creation. After all, God could have created woman first, and then created man from the woman, but He didn’t do that. He could have also created man and woman at the same time. But He didn’t do that either. The reason for this is that God was setting up a special kind of relationship between the two that was to be carried out in His created world.

God spoke through the Apostle Paul when He revealed to us what this relationship between the sexes means for us today:

1 Timothy 2:12,13 – “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. Instead, she is to continue in a quiet manner. For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”

1 Corinthians 11:7-9 – “Man is the image and glory of God, but woman is man’s glory. For man is not from woman, but woman from man, and man was not created for the woman, but woman for the man.”

By creating woman the way He did at the beginning of time, God was setting up roles for the people of His world. Specifically: “Man is to be the glory of God…Woman is to be the glory of man.” Paul explained how these roles are to be carried out by saying that men are to be the head of women. But in what way?

Paul tells us that when it comes to authoritative work in the church, such as the public preaching and teaching of the Word of God, God wants men to be the head, as they reflect God’s glory as our Redeemer, Creator, King, Preserver, etc. This is how men are to publicly display the glory of God in the church. When the preacher speaks the Word of truth to the congregation, or when he baptizes, or when he gives communion, he is putting God’s greatest glory on display. And God wants it to be men that do this.

Likewise, when it comes to the household, God wants husbands to communicate the glory of God to the family. And He wants wives to recognize this by helping their husbands convey the glory of God within the family setting.

Ephesians 5:22-24 – Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he himself is the Savior. Moreover, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.

In summary, it matters how God created woman because in that manner of creation, God designed that the man reflects the love of God as a servant head and that the woman reflects the love of God as a servant helper.

Point to consider: Men sin against God's design by distorting servant leadership into self-centered dominance. And women sin against God's design by resenting submission to authority or by claiming authority that God has not given.

Question: How old is the world?

When reading through the Old Testament, we come upon two different genealogies (Genesis 5:1-32 and 11:10-26) that give the ages of men when they became the father of the next son in the line of the Savior. This doesn’t mean that the son was the eldest son. It only means that this was the son that God used to carry on the seed that led to the birth of Jesus Christ.

The genealogy recorded in Genesis 5 takes us from Adam to Noah (at age 500). The genealogy recorded in Genesis 11 takes us from Noah (age 600 ~ the Flood) to Abraham.

When we look at Genesis 5 we see that the time from Adam to the Flood is 1656 years. ~ Add: 130+105+90+70+65+162+65+187+182+500+100 (Gen. 7:6) = 1656 years.

When we look at Genesis 11 we see that the time from the Flood to Abraham is 352 years. ~Add: 2+35+30+34+30+32+30+29+130 (Gen 11:32—12:4) = 352 years. Thus Abraham would have been born when the world was 2008 years old.

These numbers that we get come from the oldest Hebrew copy of the Old Testament that we have--a copy scribed by a Jewish group of people called the Masoretes in the year 1000AD.

There is a much older copy of the Old Testament, but it is a translation. A group of 70 Jewish scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, were commissioned by King Ptolemy II to make an Old Testament translation of the first five books (Genesis—Deuteronomy) so that he could put it into his library. So they translated the Old Testament into Greek. This was done around 250BC. (N.B. This is 1,250 years earlier than the Hebrew Masoretic text that we have.) This translation is called the Septuagint (commonly written as the Roman numeral for 70 - LXX).

There is also an Aramaic translation of the Old Testament that was written around 100AD. This is called the Peshitta.

The LXX and the Peshitta have different numbers at times for the ages of the men when they became the father of the son that was in the line of Christ. For example, Peshitta says that Lamech had Noah when he was 200 years old instead of 182. This would add 18 years to the time of the Flood. Peshitta also adds 5 years to Terah’s age when he became the father of Abraham.

The LXX has different ages for most of the fathers. When we look at Genesis 5 in the Septuagint, we see that the time from Adam to the Flood is 2,242 years. ~Add: 230+205+190+170+165+162+165+167+188+500+100 = 2,242 years.

When we look at Genesis 11 in the Septuagint we see that the time from the Flood to Abraham is 1,132 years. ~Add: 2+135+133+130+130+134+130+132+130+79+130 = 1132 years. Thus, according to the LXX, Abraham was born when the world was 3,374 years old.

Arguments can be made for both sides on which has the correct ages. Did the LXX add 100 years to the ages of most of the fathers in order to have a consistency? Did the Masoretics subtract 100 years from most of the fathers in order to make the age of Abraham seem more miraculous when Isaac was born to him? Or to make it appear more normal to when children are born in our day?

From multiple readings in the Bible, we can guess that Abraham was born approximately 2,128 years before Christ was born (assuming Jesus was born on 5BC.)

Using the numbers, then, of the Masoretic Old Testament, the world is around 6,163 years old. (1656 + 352 + 2128 +5 + 2022 = 6,163)

Using the numbers of the LXX, the world is around 7,529 years old. (2242 + 1132 + 2128 + 5 + 2022 = 7,529)

I, personally, lean toward the wording of the LXX and would age the world at over 7,500 years.

Does that seem long? That’s the lifespan of 100 people who lived to 75. It truly is a young world. Read how it all began in Genesis 1 and 2.

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Question: Can the evolution of man from amoeba to human be a fact?

No. Not if you compare it to what the Bible says. The Bible says that there was no death in the world until the time that Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree in the Garden of Eden—the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Concerning humans: Genesis 2:17; 3:22; Romans 5:12,15,17; 1 Cor 15:21-22…Concerning all other living things: Gen 1:31; Romans 8:20-22)

If death never existed, then how could evolution take place? The false teaching of evolution depends not only on time, but also on death. How overcrowded would this earth be if nothing had died over a period of a billion years?! In evolution, death becomes a necessity for things to evolve.

The Bible gives a completely different idea of death. Death is not a good thing that allows better things to exist. (How twisted we human beings become when the devil has his way with us!) Death is a bad thing. We were never meant to die. But the introduction of sin has also introduced death into our world. And without Christ, this death would become a stepping stone into eternal separation from God.