God created the world and all life in six literal, 24-hour days. According to the timeline of the Bible, the world would have to be, roughly, less than 10,000 years old. To argue that the time references to "days" in Genesis 1 is meant figuratively or poetically as thousands, or even millions, of years just to support scientific (or philosophical) theories of evolution over millions of years is to ignore the fact that God's wisdom is infinite and that he didn't need that much time to create the entire universe and everything in it.

      Genesis 1:3-4 tells us clearly that a day (Hebrew yom) is a cycle of day and night, or light and darkness, separated by evening and morning. If the first day were a thousand years long, then that would have to allow for roughly five hundred years of light and five hundred years of darkness, regardless of morning and evening marking the end or beginning of the mellennium. To use the word "day" figuratively as a thousand years is, in actuality, to use it literally since it is in the beginning and is defined for the first time. The word "day" from here on out would then have to be used figuratively as twenty-four hours since a day was first established as a thousand years -- although years are not distinguished until the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-19). Each day, therefore, is distinguished as a period of evening and morning, which, when combined, make up the seasons and the years.

      If the creation days were a thousand years, then Adam died on the sixth day, the day he was created, because he only lived 930 years (Genesis 5:5). These were not longer years than today, either, because God saw that man was living too long a corrupt life and decided to shorten his life span to 120 years (Genesis 6:3). Adam, then, would've had all his children and died before God rested on the seventh day, but Adam and Eve were the only humans created on the sixth day, since the fall of man wasn't until after God's day of rest. And on the seventh day, God finished his work (Genesis 2:2), but Jesus tells us that he is still at work ("My Father is always at work to this very day, and I, too, am working." John 5:17), which means that God rested from the work of creating for a period of time and is now at work managing the affairs of his creation. Christians, then, are admonished to continue working until they enter into God's rest (Hebrews 4:1-11). Whether or not God is currently at rest or at work is not the question, rather, it remains that he rested on the seventh day -- and if that day still remains to this day, then the previous days of the creation were just as long and unending.

      References to Psalm 90:4 ("For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by...") and 2 Peter 3:8 ("With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."), are about God's eternal nature outside of time. To use them as references to the creation days in Genesis would be to use them out of context. Moses uses it as a comparison to the brief duration of man's life and Peter uses it in reference to the day of judgment. If anything, Peter gives insight into God's eternal qualities which show that God can do in a short amount of time what it would take man (or nature) to accomplish on their own over a long period of time. To contend that the days in Genesis 1 and 2 are more than twenty-four hours would imply that God wrote Genesis in the third person and didn't distinguish between his own concept of time and man's, and that the two are different -- when in reality, it was God who created time. The distinction between days and years in these two examples is similar to the distinction that David makes between darkness and light in Psalm 139, where he explains that God sees all whether in darkness or in light (Psalm 139:12), not that darkness and light are different to God than to us, because he created them in the beginning as well.

      The "day" was a covenant established by God (Jeremiah 33:25), which cannot be broken. Furthermore, the fourth commandment bears witness to the literal days of God's creation by commanding us to keep the seventh day holy just as God had established it (Exodus 20:8-11, 31:16-17). These were God's own words to Moses that he created the heavens and the earth in six days, without differentiating between a literal day and a thousand years. Therefore, the receivers of the covenant --Moses and the Israelites-- apparently understood the Lord to mean that he had created everything in six of their own literal days -- all poetic justice aside.