First Creative Day

I will be writing 7 posts that will talk about the 7 Creative Days when God prepared the earth for man's habitation. I hope you find them interesting. Hopefully they will show, that the Genesis account is quite detailed, and is not the simplistic account many think it is. As we discussed before these days were not 24 hours in length, but could be thousands , or even millions of years long. Also the sun, earth, and universe had been created at an unidentified time period, long before, in the opening statement of Genesis 1:1 : "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

First Creative Day:

It seems that the earth had been established in orbit around the sun and was a globe covered with water before the six "days", or periods, of special creative works began. "There was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep." (Genesis 1:2). At that early point, something-perhaps a mixture of water vapor, other gases , and volcanic dust-must have prevented sunlight from reaching the surface of the earth. The Bible describes the first creative period this way: '" God proceeded to say:
" Let light come to be." Then there came to be light."' (Genesis 1:3)

This light was from the sun, but the sun itself could not be seen through the overcast. Hence, the light that reached earth was "light diffused". A swaddling band of cloud layers still enveloped the earth, preventing light from reaching its surface.

Also, what was started in one period did not have to be fully completed when the next period began. To illustrate, light gradually began to appear on the first "day", yet it was not until the fourth creative period that the sun, moon, stars could have been discerned. (Genesis 1:14-19)

Continued.....

Brien

"It seems that the earth had been established in orbit around the sun and was a globe covered with water before the six "days", or periods, of special creative works began. "There was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep." (Genesis 1:2). At that early point, something-perhaps a mixture of water vapor, other gases , and volcanic dust-must have prevented sunlight from reaching the surface of the earth."

FWIW, there was a time when I used to try to reconcile Genesis with the creation as it has apparently happened, and it once occurred to me that the 'water' could actually be a very apt metaphor for the false vacuum and quantum fluctuating spacetime at Planck time (10 ^-43 sec), which incidentally would have been quite dark too, as photons had not decoupled yet (at the "let there be light" juncture later).

Not that the writer could have possibly understood any of this, but if one believed the words were inspired by God then it wouldn't have mattered since clearly God would have understood it in dictation and knew some reader in the far distant future might.

Genesis 1:1 "In the Beginning"... beginning is a realtive term and does not mean the starting point of all eternity. In the beginning refers only to this world's beginning.

Nor was the creation of the world the real beginning of those who would come to live here. Before the foundations of the earth were laid, they (we) lived as spirit children of heavenly parents in a pre-mortal state of existence. Thus all mankind had existence for an unknown length of time before the world was ever formed.

Nevetheless, the scriptures DO NOT provide sufficient information to accurately determine the age of the earth. Generally, people hold to one of three theories:
1) the word 'day' means a 24 hour period of time
2) 'day' means one thousand years
3) the word 'day' refers to a period of undetermined length of time, thus suggesting an era, or six 'creative periods'

This last meaning helps reconcile much of the evidence seen by science as asupporting a very old age for the earth.

The Hebrew word translated as 'created' means 'shaped, fashioned, created; always divine activity". The earth was not created out of nothing. It was formed and organized out of the elements of the universe which cannot be created or destroyed. The origin of the Hebrew word for create came from the word 'baurau' which means to organize; the same way man would organize materials and build a ship or a house.

The world was not, after it was organized, without 'form and void', but rather, as understood from the Hebrew, it was 'empty and desolate'. It was enveloped in waters upon which the Spirit of God 'moved' or 'brooded' - the two words are attempts to translate from the Hebrew a word which depicts what a hen would do in incubating and guarding her eggs.