What If There Was A World Before Adam?

INTRO

What if… everything you’ve believed… is only part of the truth?

What if the opening words of Genesis contain more history than we have ever imagined?

What if there were ages before Adam?

Before Eve?

Before Eden?

And what if that possibility could help us think differently about dinosaurs, geological time…

and even the rebellion of Satan?

Welcome to What If — The Journey.

I’m Carl Schulz.

Last time we asked:

Can science and faith be reconciled?

And I suggested something I want to carry with us today.

We must learn to distinguish between God’s Word…

and our interpretation of God’s Word.

Today we take that principle somewhere challenging.

Our baseline question is:

What If There Was a World Before Adam?

Not…

“There definitely was.”

But…

What if?

Let’s investigate.

Open the Bible.

First verse.

Genesis 1:1.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Stop right there.

When? We aren’t told.

How long did it take?

That verse doesn’t tell us.

What happened immediately afterward?

That’s where interpretation begins.

Verse 2 describes an earth that is formless and empty, darkness over the deep, and God’s Spirit hovering over the waters.

Most Christians understand verse 2 simply as the original unfinished condition of God’s creation.

Nothing has gone wrong.

God has created the raw world…

and over the days that follow He forms it, fills it and orders it.

That’s probably the interpretation most of you have heard.

And it deserves to be treated respectfully.

But another interpretation has existed among Christians for a long time.

The Gap Theory.

The ruin-and-restoration theory.

It asks whether Genesis 1:1 might describe an original creation…

followed by an unknown span of time…With the natural tendency toward decay, the movement of tectonic plates beneath the surface…And all the other geological activity seen through histoy.

Immediately after this verse we read Genesis 1:2 describing conditions associated with a later stage—or, in the stronger version of the theory, a ruined creation awaiting restoration.

Some Christians strongly reject that interpretation and argue that the natural reading is continuous creation with no hidden catastrophe.

Respectfully we say that’s Fine.

We’re not afraid of disagreement.

We are simply asking whether the question itself is permissible.

Suppose for a moment that an enormous span of time occurred there.

Not six thousand years. Not sixty thousand. But Perhaps millions.

Even billions.

Remember…

I’m not assigning a number to Genesis.

I’m asking whether Genesis assigned one.

And as you can see, It didn’t.

The current scientific model gives the earth an age of roughly

4.54 billion years. If science is substantially correct about deep time…

You might ask, must Christianity collapse? Only if Christianity

requires Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 to be separated by virtually no time at all.

But does the Bible actually say that? That’s our question.

Now introduce another character into the story.

Satan.

We know the serpent appears in Eden.

By the time we meet that adversarial figure in the Garden, rebellion

against God already exists.

Something happened before the temptation of Adam and Eve.

How much before?

The Bible doesn’t give us a calendar.

The Gospel of Luke records that Jesus says:

“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

The the Revelation of John in chapter 12 gives us dramatic apocalyptic imagery.

Michael and his angels battle the dragon.

The dragon and his angels lose their place In Heaven.

And the dragon—identified with Satan—is hurled to the earth.

Now we need to be careful.

Revelation is apocalyptic literature.

Christians disagree about where Revelation 12 belongs chronologically.

And Jesus’ statement in Luke occurs in the context of His disciples returning from ministry and celebrating authority over demons.

So neither passage gives us permission to confidently announce:

“That is exactly what happened between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.”

It doesn’t.

But the passages do tell us something important.

There is a story of spiritual rebellion.

There is a heavenly conflict.

Satan’s activity becomes associated with earth.

And all of that exists before he appears as tempter in Eden.

So we can ask:

What happened?

Let your imagination travel for a moment…

but keep your Bible open.

What if God’s original physical creation was magnificent?

What if the earth had a history before Adam?

What if life flourished for enormous periods of time?

What if creatures we now know only through fossils walked across landscapes that no human being ever saw?

We now call them Dinosaurs.

Creatures in ancient oceans.

Forests unlike anything existing today.

Entire ecosystems appearing and disappearing across geological ages.

Would any of that diminish God?

Not at all. If anything…

it makes creation astonishingly large.

We sometimes speak as if God’s greatness requires creation to have been accomplished quickly.

Why?

Would a God who creates in an instant be more powerful than a God who designs processes unfolding in our time constraints over billions of years?

God isn’t strengthened by a short timetable.

And He isn’t weakened by a long one.

He’s God either way.

Now take the hypothesis one step further.

Could Satan’s rebellion have affected this world?

Could a judgment connected with that rebellion explain the condition described in Genesis 1:2?

That’s the heart of the ruin-and-restoration version of the Gap Theory.

And here I need to put up a large sign.

This is POSSIBILITY — NOT DECLARATION.

The Bible never says:

“Satan fell and therefore planet Earth became formless and empty.”

It does not say that. Could that fall have caused the big Bank often referred to:

If somebody teaches that as unquestionable biblical fact…

they have gone farther than the text.

But Could it be considered?

Yes.

Could it be investigated?

Certainly.

Can we build our entire faith upon it?

I wouldn’t. And we need Not!

Because our faith is built upon God and ultimately upon Jesus Christ…

not upon whether we successfully reconstruct events that Scripture leaves unexplained.

But I find the question fascinating for another reason.

It gives us permission to recognize how little we actually know about the beginning.

Think about how quickly we read it.

“In the beginning God created…”

And within a few verses we’re already dealing with light, sky, seas, land and life.

We move rapidly toward humanity.

Genesis is moving somewhere.

It isn’t stopping to tell us the age of every rock.

It is moving toward the people who will carry the story.

That matters.

Because maybe the purpose of Genesis is not to give us an exhaustive biography of planet Earth.

Maybe it is establishing God’s sovereignty over everything…

and then rapidly moving us toward God’s relationship with humanity.

Think about a family biography.

Suppose I write the story of my family.

I begin:

“My grandfather arrived in America…”

Then I move into his marriage, his children and eventually my own parents.

Someone could ask:

“But Carl, what was happening in Europe that year?”

I might say:

“A great deal.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

Because that isn’t the story I’m telling.

My silence about Europe doesn’t mean Europe didn’t exist.

It means the narrative has a purpose.

What if Genesis works similarly?

What if enormous amounts of cosmic and terrestrial history are simply outside the purpose of the narrative?

God could know every second of it…And know it need not be revealed.

while Moses—or whoever is being understood as the human writer in our tradition—doesn’t give us that information because it isn’t necessary for the story being told.

Now let’s bring dinosaurs back.

If dinosaurs lived tens or hundreds of millions of years before humans, as mainstream paleontology concludes…

where do Christians put them?

Some put them inside the six-day creation week and argue that human beings and dinosaurs overlapped.

Others propose different readings of the days.

Some interpret Genesis more figuratively or literately.

And some have historically turned to gap-type models.

My purpose today isn’t to select one and call everyone else foolish.

It’s to remind you:

There are Christian interpretive options.

The moment someone tells you there is only one possible Christian answer…

ask whether that conclusion came from Scripture itself…

or from a particular system for interpreting Scripture.

Those aren’t always identical.

But now the question grows darker.

If Satan had been cast down…

what was he doing before Eden?

Was he simply waiting?

Did he possess some realm of authority?

Jesus later calls him the ruler—or prince—of this world in certain contexts.

Paul uses language about spiritual powers and authorities.

The Bible presents evil not merely as bad human behavior…

but as something involving rebellious spiritual personalities and powers.

Could Satan have established some form of dominion before mankind?

Could the earth have become an arena of spiritual rebellion?

Could what we call geological catastrophe intersect somehow with a history of spiritual conflict?

Again…

we don’t know.

And I want you to become comfortable with those words.

We don’t know.

Because those aren’t words of weak faith.

They’re words of intellectual honesty.

Sometimes Christians seem to believe that we must have an answer for everything.

We don’t.

God does.

That is enough.

The question is whether we are willing to investigate what He has revealed…

without pretending He revealed what He didn’t.

That’s a discipline.

And we need it badly.

Let’s once again remember two things, both attributed to the Apostle Paul

The first written to the Church in Corinth-“For now we see through a

glass darkly and Now we know in Part” and then written to His young protege

Timothy who had been left in Ephesus to be their pastor while he was away, And

He told him, “Study to show yourself approved to God, A workman that doesn’t

Need to be ashamed.”

The Truth there are many things we can’t know this side of Heaven and

We should study to find God’s approval being a workman that has no shame.

There is another possible problem with connecting Satan’s fall to geological destruction.

Science describes many extinctions and geological changes through identifiable natural processes—impacts, volcanic activity, climate change, plate tectonics and other mechanisms.

The end-Cretaceous extinction associated with the disappearance of the non-avian dinosaurs, for example, is strongly connected in mainstream science with a massive impact event.

Does discovering a physical mechanism remove God?

No.

Does it prove Satan caused it?

No.

We shouldn’t say either.

A Christian can believe God governs reality while also studying the physical mechanisms operating within that reality.

This is exactly why science and faith don’t have to compete.

Science may tell me something about how an event occurred. Through God’s design

Theology asks larger questions about meaning, purpose and ultimate reality.

Now someone might ask:

“Why would God make dinosaurs at all?”

I don’t know.

Why did He make ten thousand varieties of things we never eat?

Why galaxies no human being saw until telescopes were invented?

Why creatures at the bottom of oceans that generations of human beings never knew existed?

Maybe creation isn’t entirely about us.

That’s humbling.

Maybe creation first displays something about God.

His imagination.

His abundance.

His creativity.

His power.

His delight in life.

And if God chose to fill the earth with creatures for ages before we arrived…

I don’t find that embarrassing.

I find it magnificent.

But here’s where Episode 13 becomes even more interesting.

Suppose there was enormous history before Adam.

Then what happens when Adam appears?

Is Adam merely the next biological creature in a long sequence?

Or does something fundamentally new happen?

Genesis doesn’t merely introduce a different animal.

It introduces someone made in the image of God.

Someone with the Breath of God.

Someone commissioned.

Someone spoken to.

Someone given moral responsibility.

Someone placed in sacred space.

A Sanctuary called Eden.

Someone with whom God communes every day.

Now we’re moving beyond paleontology.

We’re moving toward vocation.

Purpose.

Priesthood.

Relationship.

And that changes our next question completely.

What if the most important question isn’t:

“Was Adam the first biological human?”

What if the biblical story is especially interested in:

“What Adam was called to become?”

And now look carefully at Genesis.

Genesis 1 describes humanity broadly.

Male and female.

God’s image.

Be fruitful.

Multiply.

Fill the earth.

Exercise dominion.

Then Genesis 2 narrows dramatically.

One man.

A Garden.

A command.

A responsibility.

Then a woman.

A unique fellowship with God.

Traditionally, Christians read Genesis 2 as a detailed close-up of the same creation described broadly in Genesis 1.

That remains the most straightforward and common reading.

But our next What If is going to push harder.

What if Genesis 2 is emphasizing not merely Adam’s creation…

but Adam’s calling?

What if Eden functions like sacred space?

What if Adam’s assignment sounds surprisingly like the later responsibilities of priests?

What if God’s plan was to create—or call—a family through whom His knowledge and presence would be carried outward?

And then comes Cain.

Cain is afraid that someone will find him and kill him.

Cain leaves for the land of Nod.

Cain has a wife.

Cain builds a city and names it for his son Enoch.

Who are all these people?

There are traditional answers.

But are there other possibilities?

That’s where we go next.

OUTRO

Today I am not asking you to believe in a pre-Adamic civilization.

I’m not asking you to believe Satan destroyed a prehistoric world.

I’m not asking you to adopt the Gap Theory.

I’m asking something much more basic.

Are you willing to look again?

Could history be larger than the few details Genesis gives us?

Could the earth be ancient without threatening God?

Could there be chapters in the history of creation that Scripture simply did not intend to tell?

And could our willingness to admit that, actually strengthen our respect for God’s Word?

Could it improve our language with those who have not yet accepted God’s Love.

Next time we move from the world before Adam…

to Adam himself.

And we’re going to ask:

What If Adam Was Chosen for Something More?

What was Eden?

What did God intend Adam to do?

Could Adam’s role have been priestly?

Were there people outside the story?

Why was Cain afraid?

And how long were Adam and Eve actually in Eden before the serpent succeeded in tempting them?

Some of the answers may surprise us.

And some questions may remain questions.

That’s okay.

I’m Carl Schulz.

This is What If — The Journey.

Keep asking.

Keep searching.

And keep opening God’s forever Word without being afraid of what you might discover.

I’ll see you next time.