The First Earth Age
The first time we see Satan in scripture is in Genesis 3:1-5:
1. Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2. And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Some believe this to be a talking snake but it’s actually a metaphor for what God thinks of Satan. He uses a snake as a symbol of degradation and contempt that He has for him.
The metaphor of a serpent is found throughout the Bible including Revelation 12:7-9 where there can be no mistake who God is talking about:
7. And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
8. And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
9. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Did you ever wonder when Satan’s fall and subsequent rebellion occurred?
As we’ve read, Satan was already a villain before he appears in the Garden of Eden but we can go even further back in scripture to show Satan’s fall at the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis 1:1-4:
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
This light spoken of here is not light from the sun or stars, it’s the light of God. Jews call it the Shechinah Glory and Christians call it the Glory of God. It’s God’s brilliant blinding light that separates spiritual light from spiritual darkness.
The spiritual darkness that that was upon the face of the earth was brought about by the fall of Satan. How can this be if we haven’t even started the “six days” of creation yet? The answer is the first Earth age.
Most Christians don’t know there was a first Earth age but there are plenty of scriptures that describe it.
We’ll start in the book of Ezekiel, chapter 28, where God is describing Satan before and after his fall in the first Earth age.
1. The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying,
2. Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God:
3. Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee:
4. With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures:
God uses metaphors such as Prince of Tyrus or King of Tyrus but Ezekiel 28:12-16 makes it quite clear this is Satan:
12. Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.
13. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.
14. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.
15. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.
16. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.
As you can see, Satan was an anointed Cherub, the highest order of angels. You can also see that this is in the first Earth age when he was still good and walked up and down the holy mountain of God.
Genesis 1:2 describes the utter destruction of the first Earth age because of Satan’s rebellion and what follows is the refurbishing of the Earth for the second Earth age which we are currently in and when the Bible was written. Did you ever notice in Genesis 1:27-28 that it uses the term “replenish”?:
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Some Pastors will say this word means to fill but it also means to replenish and if they knew about the first Earth age they would understand it means exactly what it says, replenish.
Christians who believe the Earth to be only 6,000 years old rely on two major faulty assumptions.
The first assumption is that the story of Adam is a recap of the creation of mankind on the sixth day. If Adam was formed circa 4,000 B.C. on the sixth day, then the Earth must be 6,000 years old. In my article “Was Adam the First Man?”, I show that Adam’s story is not a recap of the creation of mankind and no where in the Bible does it say the Earth is 6,000 years old.
There’s also the problem of dinosaurs with this young Earth belief. Are we to believe that the millions of dinosaurs came into existence a mere 6,000 years ago and coexisted with humans?
The Bible is filled with stories of fallen angels, consuming fires, people being turned into pillars of salt and even battles with giants but not a word about dinosaurs? A Tyrannosaurus Rex would cause far more destruction to a village than unruly Philistines ever could and yet there is not one word about these giant creatures existing with humans in the Bible.
No Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks or Romans ever mention these creatures. Not until 1824 did we even know they existed. The Earth is not 6,000 years old.
The second faulty assumption that some Christians have comes with the overwhelming geological evidence of a global catastrophe and mass extinction, which is wrongly credited to Noah’s flood, and then is used to falsely support the young Earth theory. What they don’t realize is that there are scriptures that talk of a global catastrophe well before Noah’s flood or even Adam and Eve.
The destruction of the first Earth age is in both The Old Testament and The New Testament.
We’ll start with The New Testament first.
The New Testament uses two words translated foundation, themelios and katabole or kataballo. The word themelios means exactly what we would think of as a foundation, the basis on which something is founded or supported upon.
But the words katabole/kataballo are incorrectly translated 14 times into English as “foundation”. The word actually means the casting down or overthrow. An example of it translated incorrectly occurs in Matthew 13:34-35:
34. All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them:
35. That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.
Verse 35 should have been translated “…things which have been kept secret from the casting down or overthrow of the world.” It’s this word, katabole/kataballo, that is referring to the global catastrophe that ended the first Earth age.
Appendix 146 of The Companion Bible states “Accordingly, the Noun katabole, derived from, and cognate with the Verb, ought to be translated “disruption”, or “ruin”.”
Every time the word appears in The New Testament, except in Hebrews 11:11, it is connected with the world and thus should always be translated as “the disruption or ruin of the world”.
We see this spelled out in II Peter 3:5-7:
5. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
6. Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
7. But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
If the young Earth theory was true why would God state that “..the heavens were of old, and the earth…”?
The “heavens and the earth, which are now…” is our second Earth age which will end by fire.
The “…world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:” was the first Earth age. Some confuse this flood with Noah’s but The Old Testament will clearly show there were two floods and that this first one killed everything. There was no Noah and his family, no animals not even birds left, nothing.
We’ll start in the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1:1-2:
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
The word “was” is in verse two is Strong’s Concordance #1961, hayah, meaning exist, become or come to pass. It’s translated “became” sixty-seven times in the Bible. The second verse should read “And the earth became without form and void…”. Verse one is the creation of the world and verse two is it’s overthrow or casting down.
This is the katabole/kataballo spoken of in The New Testament.
The phrase “without form” is Strong’s Concordance #8414, tohu, meaning “waste”. The word “void” is Strong’s Concordance #922, bohuw, and means “undistinguishable ruin”. Both of these terms imply a previous state confirming “was” should have been translated “became”. You can build a house but you can’t build a “ruined” house.
Confirmation of this comes in Isaiah 45:18, “For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.” The word “vain” here is the Hebrew word tohu again. God doesn’t contradict Himself. He couldn’t have created the world in vain in Genesis 1:2 and then state that He didn’t create it in vain here in Isaiah. The contradiction is in the mistranslation of Genesis 1:2.
As for this catastrophic global flood that made the Earth without form and void, we turn to Jeremiah 4:23-26:
23. I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light.
24. I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly.
25. I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled.
26. I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the LORD, and by his fierce anger.
Again, the term “was” should have been rendered “became” as we read “the birds of the heavens were fled.” They “became” no more. These verses are the aftermath of what happened in II Peter 3:5-7. Notice that everything was destroyed. There were no people, birds or cities and what was once a fruitful place was utterly broken down, or as the word katabole is defined, cast down. Also notice there was no light which again references Genesis 1:2, “and darkness was upon the face of the deep”. Noah’s flood had his entire family and two of every animal including birds that survived.
We read more of this flood in Psalm 104:6-7:
6. Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains.
7. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.
The word “hasted” here is Strong’s Concordance # 2648, chaphaz, and it means instantly as seen in Genesis 1:9-10:
9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
This flood receded instantly as opposed to Noah’s flood which lasted an entire year before they could leave the Ark. Two different floods.
This is why it states in Genesis 1:28 to “replenish” the Earth. God destroyed the first Earth age because of Satan’s fall and rebellion in which a third of the angels joined in as stated in Revelation 12:3-4:
3. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
4. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
Satan and his fallen angels began a war against God as it states in Revelation 12:7-9:
7. And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
8. And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
9. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
There are few specifics of this rebellion but we do see Satan cast down to Earth and we know the angels that followed him are condemned because they left their heavenly realm as we read in the book of Jude verse 4, “For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.” Skip to verse 6, “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.”
We can see from these verses that the rebellion was “of old” and that the fallen angels “left their own habitation”. This was the reason darkness prevailed over the Earth and God felt compelled to wipe it clean and start again by refurbishing and replenishing the planet with new plants, animals and humans.
In Hebrews 9:26 it states that Jesus has often suffered because of the rebellion by some of His children but at the second coming, things will be restored as they were before Satan’s fall, “For then must He often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.”
We see the usage of katabole for the translation of “foundation” again in I Peter 1:20 when Peter speaks of Jesus in the first Earth age, “Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you,”
The only hope for an end to this rebellion comes from Jesus Himself as He stated in Matthew 25:34, “Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:” Again, Jesus used the word katabole, disruption or ruin of the world, not themelios or foundation in this verse.
We may never know everything that has happened in the past but one thing I think is certain, there was a first Earth age.
Christians continuing to promulgate a 6,000 year old Earth do far more disservice to the faith than they can possibly imagine. God wants all to come to repentance and seek the Kingdom but no rational non-believer would ever be open to the Gospel if they continue to hear statements that don’t make sense. I think this is why so many people today have a hard time believing the Bible.
Science can’t contradict the creator of all things, God, but Christianity can’t contradict reality either.
Well said