In summary then the Babylonian priestly myth which the Greeks also followed says that the upper part of the universe and the earth here is the result of the cutting in half of the body of Tiamot, or Tomtu, Tomte(???), a lot of different names. And that’s just…I just tell you that to show you how bizarre and silly those legends are.
But what the Bible says is completely reasonable. God took the waters way up…way up. Left some still engulfing the earth and in between created the separator between the waters which was the expanse we call heaven, space…the vast space of the universe. Go to verse 7, and verse 7 basically reiterates, “And God made the expanse and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse and it was so.” And again he repeats the same thing again, just to be sure you get it. There’s an expanse and God separated it. The waters went up, some of the waters stayed below, He created space in between.
Just a couple of footnotes here. It’s important to understand that this is all creative. That is to say it is all creative power going on here of proportions that are just absolutely beyond our capacity to understand. And I want you…I say that in reference to verse 7 because the word used there, God made the expanse. And some people have said…Well this isn’t create, this isn’t the word bara, this is another word asah in Hebrew, does it signify some different activity? Does it signify that this…do we need to make a distinction here? A lot of times Bible teachers will make distinctions that they shouldn’t make because all languages have synonyms and even words that have shades of variation can be used in a synonym fashion. And the question here is…does the word “made” change the actual action of God? And the answer is no. It does not signify any different activity on God’s part than creating out of nothing. In fact, over in chapter 2 verse 3 the verse ends, God rested the seventh day, blessed it and sanctified it. Rested from all His work which God had created and made. And there you have those two words bara and asah and basically presented as synonyms. And I think that’s a wonderful note that the Spirit of God has placed there so we wouldn’t worry about whether there was some distinction.
The word bara is the defining word. And here in this context it means to create something out of nothing, or to put it another way, to do something that transcends normal ability, to do something that can’t be done. That’s bara in this text. And made is just a synonym to use another word referring to the same thing. Now bara can be used simply for something normal. It’s used in Isaiah 54:16, “Behold, I have created the smith who blows the fire and coals and brings out a weapon.” God…57:19 of Isaiah, says, “Creating the praise of the lips.” Those things are more normal. They don’t necessarily speak of the same power of creation exhibited in Genesis. So bara doesn’t always mean creating in the sense of ex nihilo, divine fiat creation, but in this context that is distinctively what it means. And the word “made” is just another word to affirm the same thing. We could say it is a synonym. And by the way, in Exodus, for you scholars, Exodus 34:10, asah is used as a synonym for bara in Exodus 34:10. So I see them used in synonym fashion.
We could say it this way…in the Genesis context this word asah is used to specify the kind of bara, the kind of creation of which the verse speaks. God is creating and in this creating He makes something that never existed. He is creating but in the creating, as verse 1 indicates, the broad picture, He is making things expressed by the use of the other word. So in verse 7 He made the expanse. It was still creation, but it was a component of creation, it was the making of something that never before existed.
Now, I’m going to hurry and finish…the separation of water above the sky and below has led to much discussion, folks…much discussion. The question is, what is this water? And, you know, I have to confess to you, I don’t know…I don’t know. It could be that clear out at the end of infinite space there is water. We know that there is water in the air, that we know, we feel the rain. There may be some other feature that we don’t know about way at the other…at the very end of the limitless vault of heavenly space, I don’t know. There are many who believe that there is in this creation there was created around the earth a canopy, a canopy of water. This is the view of Whitecomb and Morris, that the waters above the expanse, the waters above heaven were like a vapor that just engulfed the whole earth and created a kind of a hot house environment. And that’s…they suggest why animals lived so long and plants lived so long. You had animals living long enough to become dinosaurs, you had people living long enough to become like Methuselah, 900 plus years old because they were shielded from ultra-violet light because of this water canopy. And then at the flood, that canopy burst loose and drowned the earth, along with the tectonic cataclysm that occurred underneath the earth that broke up the basic elements of the earth and created the post-flood environment.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
