Was there life on earth before Adam?

I believe the answer is yes and I will attempt to explain why I think that way. I am not a Bible scholar and do not claim to have any special knowledge. These are just my understandings of what I read in the Bible and from various expository texts.

Let’s start with reading Ezekiel 28:11-19 where we read about the fall of Satan.

11 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
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.
17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.
18 Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.
19 All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.

In this passage we are told that Satan was perfect from the very first day he was created by God until sin and iniquity were found in him as a result of pride (see Isaiah 14:12-17). We also see in the passage above that Satan was cast out of the kingdom (mountain) of God and banished from the stars of Heaven. Verse 18 states that Satan and his kingdom subjects worshipped God in earthly sanctuaries or tabernacles which gave Satan the opportunity to slander God through traffick (trading). This led to his iniquity and later to to the iniquity of his earthly subjects and a third part of heavenly angels. It is also true that verses 18 and 19 refer to the future of Anti-Christ. One teacher I heard said that he thought that during the time from after the Rapture when Satan and his angels will be cast down to Earth, until the the Battle of Armageddon, Satan and AntiChrist will somehow share the same human body. I’m not sure about that, but it’s an interesting thought.

Back to this topic… the Bible does seem to indicate that a “pre-Adamite” society existed sometime in the distant past, although it does not say how long ago this was. If this is true, as I believe it is, it explains away many of the conflicts between creationists and evolutionist regarding the geological age of the earth. I know there are some “creationist” scientists who say that Noah’s flood was enough to create all the fossil records that we are finding. I think this is a much more plausible explanation.

Genesis 1:1 reads “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

The word ‘created’ comes from the Hebrew word bara which means “to bring into existence” or to create from nothing.

Genesis 1:2 reads “And the earth was without form, and void….”

Some scholars believe a better translation would be “And the earth became without form, and void”. This is because the word translated “was” in the KJV is the Hebrew word “hayah” which means “to become”. The translators of the NIV version of the Bible recognized this and made the appropriate notes in the margin! The phrase “without form and void” is the Hebrew “tohu va bohu” (meaning formless and empty).

Isaiah 45:18 reads “thus says the Lord that created the heavens; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He has established it, He did not create it in vain [Hebrew: tohu], He formed it to be inhabited”

The phrase “in vain” in Isaiah 45 is the Hebrew word “tohu” that was translated “formless” in Genesis 1:2. We can see clearly in Isaiah 45:18 that God didn’t create the earth “tohu” but it became “tohu” in Genesis 1:2. In addition, we can see that in Gen 1:2 the earth became not only “tohu” but it also became empty. For something to become empty, it must first be “not empty”.

For some reason (another study) God chose to destroy what was and make the earth formless and empty. Then God had to again put things in order which He did in the six days of creation.

There are a lot of people who say that the discovery of dinosaur fossils which they date as a million years old proves the Bible is wrong. Not true. The Bible tells us that in the beginning, maybe a billion years ago even, God created the heavens and the earth. This earth was not empty or formless as tradition has taught. God doesn’t tell us what animals were in the earth during that period. But it is quite possible that is when the dinosaurs roamed.

The verses quoted above from Ezekiel show that there was a period of time when Satan (Lucifer) was perfect and sinless. It is during this time that I believe that angels ruled on the earth and possibly on other planets. This appears to be a probationary time for the angels to test them before trusting them in an eternal state.

In Genesis 1:28, Adam is told to “replenish the earth”. If the earth had not been “plenished” prior to that, why would he be told to re-plenish it?

The beginning of Jeremiah 4:23 reads, “I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without form, and void”.

This only occurred at the time of Genesis 1:2. Reading a little further in Jeremiah 4 we see that God was angry and that the cities had been broken down. It seems apparent that if there were cities to be broken down before Genesis 1:2, that there must have been life in those cities.

What do you think?