Perhaps your question is sincere. Let me see if I can help...

But maybe, you ask that because the things we use to measure days were not created until the fourth “day?” Meaning, you’d like to fit many millions of years into the space of those three un-measurable days? Meaning, you are uncomfortable with modern science’s claim that the Bible is not scientifically accurate, but that maybe it is good for a book of inspiration and poetry? You’re trying to help moderns believe the Scriptures, right?

I disagree with all your premises. Modern science has been proved wrong again and again. And you do not help to create true faith in a man when you appeal to his brain. Understanding is not believing. Not understanding, but trusting anyway, that is faith.

The word “day” is used a multitude of times in Scripture, and you don’t question – if the context fits it – the fact that twenty-four hours is meant. But here you balk. Why, by what logic?

Isn’t our God able to communicate well enough for you? When He says “day” and you know for sure what He means in the last three of the creation days, don’t you think He would inform us if He meant something different for the first three of them?

Or is your God too small to create everything that needs to be created in three “days”, as we know the word?

If the evolution of life is your hang-up, I submit to you that the life-forms that were created were done so on the fifth and sixth days, when sun, moon, and stars were playing their classic roles, and producing the kind of days upon which we all agree. The twenty-four-hour kind.

As for the age-of-the-earth hang-ups you might have, know that there are other scientific arguments for a young, a very young, Earth. I’ll leave you to check out these points on your own, but you will find them. My study here is about “days”: There simply is no need for a multi-million year “day.”

Consider: In all six creation days there was “an evening and a morning.” If we destroy the obvious meaning of “day” we must now go to work on the common words “evening” and “morning.”

Or think about this: Time began at the first moments of creation. First and last there is eternity. Then suddenly in the middle of all of this eternity, Time. Time is measurable but its measurability does not define its existence. If I do not have the means whereby to measure a substance, I do not conclude that the substance does not exist.

Twenty-four hours is a quantity of time which we have come to define in terms of the measures we see in place. But that same period of time can exist without the measures. There was a small chunk of time that transpired from one part of the creation to the next. God called that chunk a day. Later we discovered how to ascribe measurement definitions and boundaries. But we did not change that chunk of time.

I hand you a plank of wood, and tell you it is six feet long. But you don’t measure in feet, you measure in meters. A third person may have a third measure, and a squirrel knows no measures at all but knows when he is beginning his climb over it and his ending moment on the same plank.

The wood has not changed in its substance, regardless of the one measuring it, and the names of those measures. The distance is the same.

So is time. Yes, you can have a day without a sun or even an earth. Time is a creation of God just as the heavenly bodies that inhabit Time.

If God wanted you to know that He needed millions of years to form waters and land forms and plants, He would have found a way to communicate that truth. But the Scripture is silent on that matter, and simply calls on us to believe His Word without question. He says day, and He implies twenty-four hours.

Learning that faith lesson in Genesis 1 will certainly help us as we progress through the Book.

Challenge “homework”. Use the principle I have enunciated above to explain how one could have Light without a sun (Genesis 1:3, 14) and evening-morning without heavenly bodies. Remember of course that Faith is the first principle, but God gives His own inner understanding of many of the Bible’s mysteries to those who are willing to first trust His Word as it is.

Others search all of their lives and never are satisfied with God or His Bible because they have not sought that First principle. “Lord increase our faith!”

Not talking about gullibility here. Some people have too much faith of the wrong variety. They literally believe everything that anyone with any seeming authority says to them. If it’s in a book, or on TV, or on the internet, it must be true. That’s being gullible, not believing.