When the Beginning began,
God created out of nothing the heavens and the earth,
and the earth was a wasteland and devoid of life,
and darkness covered the surface of the deep,
and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

The “gap theory” was invented by G. H. Pember (1837-1910) and was based entirely on the failure to see that Gen. 1:1-2 was one sentence in the Hebrew text. He attempted to accommodate the evolutionists demand for millions of years by making a “gap” of millions of years between Gen. 1:1 and Gen. 1:2. Once he dug a ditch between verses one and two of Genesis, he claimed two things.

First, millions of years transpired from Gen. 1:1 to Gen 1:2. We can throw all the dinosaurs, cave men, etc. into that gap and thus accommodate the evolutionists demand for millions of years.

Second, the Book of Genesis does not actually describe the original Creation but a “recreation” of the world that happened millions of years after Satan had destroyed the world.  Genesis only describes the rebuilding of the earth, not the original Creation.

That such nonsense ever became popular was due to the influence of C. I. Scofield. It was a convenient and cheap trick that provided a way to wiggle out of being embarrassed by aggressive evolutionists. Anything they threw against us, we simple threw into the “gap” between verse one and two.

The idea that Genesis did not describe the original Creation of the universe was a complete surprise to the Jews and the Christian scholars. It meant that everyone in the history of biblical studies, both Jewish and Christian, were wrong in their understanding of Genesis. The only one who got it right was Pember!

This alone should make you hesitate to buy into Pember’s ideas. His claim that ALL the rabbis and All the theologians throughout All then ages were wrong and he alone was right is enough to question the sanity of anyone idiotic enough to believe Pember. The “faith once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3) means the church was not waiting for Pember, Joseph Smith, Charles Russell,  Ellen G. White or Scofield, etc. to show up and give new truths that no one ever heard of in the history of the world.

Prayer: Thank you, LORD, for giving us what to believe and how to live in the Bible alone. Thank you that if something is true, then it will not be new but it can be traced down through the centuries as part of Christian Theology. Thank you, that if a doctrine has no historical pedigree, then we can reject it. Keep me, O Lord, from being novel or new in my theology. May I never create a new “truth” but defend the old truths that were revealed for all of time in the Scriptures.