Bible Study Helps: Genesis 1:1-5
The creation account (myth? Story? Narratives?) is not as simple as it seems on the surface, yet a child can understand it. For adults, it means a look at literary form, the big why of God's work, our place in the universe, and understanding competing “narratives” or explanations, even “scientific” ones.
This account uses poetic structures that make a point about God’s power, will, purpose, love, design.
How did He create the “world” (and by that I mean physical, material reality and time, not just this planet).
3 days forming: Day 1, Light; Day 4, Astronomical entities that “rule” the light
Day 2, Seas and Sky, Day 5, Fish and Birds; Day 3, Land and Plants, Day 6, Animals and Humans (Humans Separately)
Second,
ex nihilo, out of nothing. There is a song, “One single drop of rain
Your salty tear became blue ocean
One tiny grain of sand turning in your hand
The world in motion…”’ Sorry, that’s heresy. The earth did not come out of
God’s body or some previous material reality.
Only God is truly creative, creator. We rearrange the materials and our experience of His creation. When I write a novel, I take one form of reality and experience and put it into another. Musicians take the mysteries of sounds and rearrange them, etc.
Only God is Creator.
If so, what does it mean in verse 2? What was He hovering over if nothing existed before? What is the deep? What is the face of the waters?
OK, how much time do you have to think about this? True, in heaven we’ll get it right, but that doesn’t mean we don’t struggle with it now. There are linguistic issues here and poetic ones.
First, what are these Hebrew words and how do they get translated into English? What do your Bibles say?
Chaos? Void? Sea? Watery depths? Ruah? (Wind or spirit?) These are symbolic as well as physical. Sea in the Bible means chaos, evil, void. In Revelation 21:1: “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea.” “He cast our sins into the sea.”
The struggle to understand and fit this into our brains have led students of the Scripture to say either each day was aeons long (periods) or that there was a Gap theory: “The universe—heaven and Earth—was originally ("in the beginning") created aeons ago; life flourished for millions or billions of years. But this world (perhaps just Earth and not the entire universe) grew to be evil, and God destroyed it in a gigantic cataclysm. Earth became "without form and void" as a result of this destruction. (Gap theorists hold that the verb in the second verse is more accurately translated as became or had become rather than as was. The familiar six-day creation—a re-creation really—then followed, mere thousands of years ago, upon the ruin and chaos of this ancient former world.” (National Center for Science Education, not a pro-creation source, of course.)
Another literary view says Verse 1 is like the Title, and the void and chaos is due to Satan’s fall. The creation is then “good” in contrast to what is before, but that gives a lot of power to Satan.
Me? Still trying to figure it out. I like to think about what the account means rather than every act of God who could do this, which I can’t understand. However, I’ll be honest with you; I don’t believe the world is 6,000 years old, and I don’t believe the Bible intends for us to think that.
This does not mean that God didn’t create before Gen 1:1. Only that the heavens and earth were created, and that God brought good order out of chaos or disorder or nothing or non-ness.
So, the big question, Why did God create the physical reality and time and then man?
Comments