A friend referred me to an excellent blog post by Tim Challies, a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario. The post explains why he’s a six-day creationist, and I think he’s right on the mark. He expresses his reasons very well, and my reasons are similar.
Quite simply he says:
- The Bible teaches it
- The writers believed it
- Science confirms it.
Take a look at his full post here. It’s short, simple, and well-written. I was trying to come up with some other reasons, but those pretty much sum it up.
I might add that it’s the easiest and most natural position to defend theologically. It makes the most sense of Jesus’ direct relationship to Adam found in Luke’s genealogy (Luke 3:23-38); it makes sense of Paul calling Jesus the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45). It provides the best explanation as to how sin and death entered a perfect creation (Romans 5:12-14, 1 Corinthians 15:21), and it explains how death is the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26).
sixdaysblog 
We need to read Scripture with care. And we should not delete the first to verses of the Bible. http://textsincontext.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/in-the-beginning/
Thanks Michael. I agree wholeheartedly. However I think you’re holding to an old earth or theistic evolutionary view.
In the original Hebrew there are no verses to separate verse one from verse two, so we need to study the entire passage with the rest of Scripture in order to have a better understanding. I attached a summary of how I interpret Genesis 1, and I also attached a good article explaining the use of the words “create” and “made” as indicated in Genesis 1:1 and Exodus 20:11.
https://sixdaysblog.com/2012/07/21/genesis-1/
http://creation.com/morning-has-broken-but-when
From reading your website I see that you suggest that we have no clue from Scripture how much time elapsed between the creation of the universe in verse 1 and verse 3. But I’d argue that we can have a clue if we study all of Scripture in context. I understand Genesis 1:1 to be an overview or summary of the entire creation account. Then God provides details surrounding his creation in Genesis 1:2 through Genesis 2:4.
I do understand how one might think there’s an unknown length of time suggested in or after Genesis 1:1, but when I read the rest of Scripture I think that argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Exodus 20:11 makes it clear that everything (heavens and earth) was created or “made” in six days.
I follow your argument on time compression in Scripture. It’s good to be aware of that, but we simply need to take each passage in context to determine if there is any time compression. There’s no reason to assume it.
I also see you take issue with Exodus 20:11 as referring to God creating the entire universe because it uses the word “made” instead of “created”, as in Genesis 1:1. But in Genesis 2:4 the words “created” and “made” are both used when referring to the heavens and the earth: “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” I see no indication of an unknown period of time when reading these verses, and both words are used when describing God’s six-day creation. In that light I think it makes perfect sense that Exodus 20:11 tells us that God created everything (heavens and the earth) in six days and that we can’t insist that God was just making something that he had previously created.