Genesis Segment 03 (1:15-2:7)

(Gen 1:16-18) And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. (17) And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, (18) And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

The great lights are the sun and moon. The word for lights in this verse and in Gen 1:14 and 15 (מאורה, menorah), is different from the word used in Gen 1:3 (אור, or). There it was just light. Here it means luminous bodies. As mentioned before, prophecy about Satan is given in months (lunar time) and prophecy for God’s children is given in days (solar time). Again it is stated that God divided the light from the darkness.

(Gen 1:19) And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Four is the number of the Earth: the four seasons, the four winds, the four quarters, the four elements (earth, wind, fire, and water), the fourth body (Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth), etc.

(Gen 1:20-23) And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. {21} And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. {22} And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. {23} And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

Moving creature could also be translated “swarmers,” which tells us that the waters were swarming or teeming with life. Have you ever been scuba diving? The seas are swarming with life. It is everywhere, from microscopic plants and animals to giant whales. When diving, you can see millions upon millions of schooling fish. They are everywhere. The Bible is accurate again.

This KJV translation of the first phrase in verse 20 could be literally rendered: “And said God, let the waters swarm with swarmers having a soul of life.” The word for soul is nephesh and for life is chay, which also means flesh. So you could say that the swarmers were flesh with a soul or living flesh.

In the next verse, the words “living creature” are again the words nephesh and chay. So here again, we have flesh with a soul or living flesh, hence a living soul. The word for Whale is a word that means a large marine or land animal, depending on the context. Here it means a large marine animal. It is translated elsewhere sea monster, sea serpent, dragon, and jackal.

These animals are to reproduce after their kind. They did not evolve from one species to another. It was good; God looked on it with joy. Day five ends.

(Gen 1:24) And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

This is the sixth day. Six is the number of humankind, who were created this day.

The earth is ‘erets which we said earlier means earth, ground, world, land, country, region and other things. Here God says to “let the earth bring forth the living creature.” All flesh is made of the same substance as the earth. Everything you find in flesh comes from the earth. All the chemicals and compounds of the flesh are also of the earth. “Living creature” is from nephesh and chay: flesh with a soul. The word for cattle actually means any quadruped (four footed animal). That includes mice, cows and elephants and every other four footed animal. A creeping thing is a reptile or any other rapidly moving animal. It includes insects.

The word “beast” gives the impression that God was talking about animals. The word for beast is chay, which means living flesh. In this verse, God said to let the earth bring forth the living flesh, which is every living creature, from the substance of the earth.

(Gen 1:25) And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

So all of the life created here is to reproduce after its own kind. There is no evolution. There is another interesting thing about this verse. The word “earth” is used three times here. The first two times it is ‘erets. The third time it is adamah or ground. Hence the verse literally reads “and everything that crawls on the ground.”

(Gen 1:26) And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

The use of “us” is interesting and important, but let us finish our discussion of mankind. The word for man is adam. It is the root word for the word adamah or ground. It means ruddy or reddish hence the brownish red earth. There is no article (the) associated with the word adam here, so it means generic man, or specifically, mankind (the entire species). It is not the man, just man. God created mankind on the sixth day. In Adam He created mankind. Adam was the first man and from his loins through the woman later named “Eve”, came all of mankind. Yet God destoryed all of Adam’s offspring except the family of Noah, so through Noah came all of mankind as we know it today.

Some teach that just as God created all the four-footed animals, fish, birds, etc, on the sixth day, that He also created all mankind on the sixth day. This teaching states that the races came from the creation of mankind on the sixth day. It teaches that God created the races in situ or in place on this day. I used to subscribe to that theory when I believed in a local flood. However, my in-depth studies of the Bible have taught me that this theory is untrue. Since I no longer subscribe to the local flood theory, I must understand that all races had to originate with Noah and his family, and not on the sixth day of creation. Thus the question, “Where did the races originate?” must be left for a later investigation. That investigation must necessarily come at a time after Noah. In fact, I believe that we must study the Tower of Babel to understand where the races came from. We will thus wait until our study takes in the events surounding the Tower of Babel to delve further into the subject of the races.

Who is the “us” in this verse? Who was with God at creation? It is simple. The Trinity were there: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But this is not all. All the entire heavenly host were there. The heavenly host consists of angels, seraphs, and cherubs. The bible tells us that there is myriad upon myriad of angels (Heb 12:22, Rev 5:11).Yet it is only the Trinity in view here when God said “Let us make…”

We are to have dominion over all the earth. With ownership and sovereignty comes responsibility. While we are in charge of the earth, that does not give us license to be irresponsible with it. Responsibility means conservation. We should practice conservation in everything we do. We should subdue the earth and use it to our advantage, but we should not deplete its resources. We must leave resources for others and for posterity. I doubt, though, the we can deplete the resources of the earth. And the environment is not fragile. God made the earth to be rugged and it will last until the end of the age. I AM NOT an environmentalist. I am not militant, and I do not want to encroach on property rights. We must be good stewards of the earth because God commands us to be good stewards of all things in our keep. I am simply advocating good stewardship tempered with common sense.

This may be a good place to discuss oil. Oil is, by any definition, the engine that runs the world and especially the free world. The free world does not include communist nations, dictatorships, or Islamic countries where Sharia law rules. We have been taught, or, rather, indoctrinated into believing in a very old earth. It is an earth old enough, academia tells us, for millions of carcasses of prehistoric flora and fauna to become oil in underground preserves. Moreover, these preserves of oil are finite and very limited to the numbers of carcasses buried and transformed into oil. The process is not completely understood but it is thought that anaerobic bacteria acted on them to start the process and then perhaps the surrounding media attributed to the further conversion into oil. Additionally, of course, the process took millions upon millions of years to complete. Those that teach this also warn us that we will run out of these fossil fuels in the near future.

As a young earth creationist, I find that these teachings are incompatible with my theology. The world would tell me that my theology is a useless, mind-numbed superstition. Let them. If the earth is not millions upon millions of years old, as I believe, then oil formation could not have taken the millions of years it is purported to have done. That leaves us two options. Either God created the fossil fuels in place as we find them today, or there is another process involved in the formation of crude oil. The first option is very possible, but I opt for the second option.

The second option states that there is another process creating oil. If the process is not able to take millions or years, and it is not if the earth is young, then the fossil fuel theory is not acceptable. Let us discard it. Since crude oil does not come from fossils that are millions of years old, where does it come from? The answer is a simple one. Oil is abiotic. What is that, you ask? Well the combining form,”-biotic”, means “life.” The prefix “a-” means “not.” Therefore, a-biotic or abiotic means “not life.” In other words, crude oil is not formed from something that once lived, nor is it formed by anaerobic bacteria. If it is not formed from fossils that once lived, or bacteria, how is it formed? According to proponents of abiotic oil, it is produced from magma. Opponents say that there is microscopic evidence of the fossils that formed the oil in the oil pumped out of the ground. Proponents give several reasons why oil cannot be formed from fossils. They are: Oil being discovered at 30,000 feet, far below the 18,000 feet where organic matter is no longer found. Additionally, wells pumped dry are later replenished. The volume of oil pumped thus far is not accountable from organic material alone according to present models. NASA studies show conclusively that inorganic methane gas is produced on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. If Titan can form methane gas inorganically, then so can the earth. I believe that from the beginning earth produced abiotic oil and gas and continues to do so at this very moment. I believe that fossil fuels are a misnomer and that oil was not produced over eons of time from the fossils of plants and animals.

Shortages of oil are not caused by dwindling reserves. Shortages are caused by politics, and sometimes by greed. Environmentalists do not want us to find and extract oil from the earth for ecological purposes. They wish to “return to a simpler time” when oil was not the engine that drives our economy. I personally like the creature comforts we have today and do not wish to go back to a less technological time. If the environmentalists wish that kind of life, let them go out into the country and practice that life. However, do not try to force such ideas upon the rest of us. Because of environmetalists, we have artificial shortages. Because of politics, we have artificial shortages. Because we are dependent of oil rich Muslim countries for oil, we have artificial shortages. There is no shortage of oil reserves, just a shortage of desire to go and get those reserves. The earth is not running of oil. We are causing our own shortages because of our policies.

(Gen 1:27) So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Whereas verse 1:26 uses simply the word ‘man’ meaning ‘mankind’, this verse has “the man’, meaning specifically Adam, the first man. The Hebrew in verse 26 is ארם adam, man. In this verse it is הארם, ha adam, the man. This, then is the account of the actual creation of the man Adam. In the previous verse, God was announcing His plan to create mankind in His own image to the hosts of heaven. In this verse God actually creates mankind by creating the first one of mankind. He was the first one from whom all mankind would spring.

Here, God creates the man in His image. What image is this? Let us examine the word and then the context. The phrase, ‘in His image’ in Hebrew is בצלמו, betselmo. It is the combination of ב, (the letter beth-pronounced ‘bait’), which is the preposition ‘in’ here, and צלמו, tselemow. Tselemo, is the mascuiline singular form of צלם, tselem, image. It is followed by the suffix of ו, (the letter vav), ‘oh’, which makes it in the third person, in this case, ‘His’. Put it all together and betselmo (בצלמו) means “in His image.” Let us define ‘image’, צלם, tselem. The word means, among other things, image, a likeness, a statue, a model, a drawing, or a shadow. In context it means image of likeness. Man is made in the likeness of God. Is this likeness physical? Spiritual? Philosophical? Allegorical? It is possible that some likeness is physical. Observe haw Ezekiel described God when he saw Him.

And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it. And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about. As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spoke (Ezekiel 1:26-28).

We see the likeness of Yehovah as Ezekiel observed Him. He was glowing with fire in the color of amber from the waist up and from the waist down, He had the appearance of bright fire, perhaps like that of glowing molten steel. Ezekiel did not say there were arms or legs, but implied those things by mentioning the loins or waist. The appearance of the bow may refer to shining like a halo or rainbow around His head. Now let us observe Ezekiel’s second vision:

Then I beheld, and lo a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the color of amber. And he put forth the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the inner gate that looketh toward the north; where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provoketh to jealousy (Ezekiel 8:2-3).

Here God reached out His hand to Ezekiel or at least it appeared to Ezekiel as a hand. In Isaiah’s vision (Isaiah 6:1), Yehovah was sitting on a throne and had a train around Him. He was arrayed in royal robes. So, based on these visions man has somewhat the physical likeness of God. Yet the Bible tells us that God is a Spirit. Man is made from the elements (Periodic Table Elements) of the earth. He is made of the same materials that the dirt on the earth consists of. One evangelist says that man is made of dirt. That is very apropos. Man is flesh, God is Spirit. Yes in the likensses we have seen, God has a body, arms, legs. And a head and hands. He also sits on a throne arrayed in royal robes. Man does have some of the physical likeness of God, but not much.

Do we have a spiritual likeness to God? Again, yes, but with reservations. Man has a living soul, a body, and a spirit. But our spirit is not anything like His Spirit. His Spirit is holy and without sin. Our spirit is sinful. The body has a soul that gives it life and a spirit that gives the soul its being. But God is a Spirit and He is perfect. Our spirits and souls are subject to sin; His is not. But yes, we have a spiritual likeness of Him as well.

Is our likeness to God philosophical? God has instilled in us a hunger for Him. He has given us some of his attributes like the ability to love, to hate, to feel, to have compassion, etc. In those ways our philosophies are somewhat similar, but terribly lacking. Our abilities are subject to whims, to sin, and to foibles. God’s attributes are not.

How about allegorical; is our likeness to God allegorical? Yes, in some ways. God has taken on an allegorical physical appearance even though He is Spirit. His likeness is somewhat like ours but only in a very limited way. He is so far advanced above us that we could never be exactly like Him. Yet, he leads us to see Him like us through passages in the Scriptures where he appears to men. Sometimes he appears as a man walking down the road. Sometimes He appears as and angel-the Angel of the Lord (see “The Memra“). Perhaps we also like to allegorically compare ourselves to God.

I believe that the most obvious way were made in the image of God is in our inner likeness. We are like Him in many ways: God has a mind; so do we. God has personality; so do we. God loves; so do we. God has emotions; so do we. God is moral; we have the capacity to be moral, though we are not at all times so. God has a will; so do we. God is imaginative; so are we. God is creative; so are we. God remembers, that is, He has memory; so do we. God is compassionate; we have the capacity to be compassionate, though we are not at all times so; God has a sens of humor; so do most of us. God is protective of His own; so are we. It is in these ways, and more, that we are made in the image and likeness of God.

(Gen 1:28) And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

A reiteration. The word for “replenish” simply means to fill up. We have God’s command to reproduce. If God commanded it, can it be bad? I don’t believe mankind will ever overpopulate the earth. We have already discussed dominion over the earth in a previous verse.

(Gen 1:29-30) And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. {30} And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

The word renderred “meat” simply means food. It appears that every creature, including man, was a vegetarian. If so, that is no longer true. Read God’s health laws and you will see that men may eat flesh.

(Gen 1:31) And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

The sixth day ended. The human race had been created. God saw that they were very good. All races are good.

(Gen 2:1) Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

All the host of them were finished. What is this host? Is it the earth, moon, sun, and stars? The English would certainly suggest so. This verse simply means that all of creation was finished.

(Gen 2:2-3) And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. {3} And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

People say this happened in seven 24 hour days or 7000 years, or some other time period. I personally believe in the seven twenty four hour days. God sanctified the seventh day, that is, he set it apart from the others as a Sabbath. Sabbath means rest and the Sabbath was made for man, according to Jesus. God rested this day, which means he stopped creating. For us it means a physical rest from our daily labors. Seven means divine completion and this completed the Divine work of creation.

(Gen 2:4-5) These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, {5} And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Green’s Interlinear Bible translation puts it like this: “These are the births of the heavens and of the earth when they were created in the day that Jehovah was making earth and heavens–and every shrub of the field was not yet on the earth, and every plant of the field had not yet sprung up: for Jehovah God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.”

I would further paraphrase it like this: “The upcoming narrative is the family history of the heavens, the Earth, the plants of the field, and the herbs of the field when God had created them (in the day he created them) for God had not yet caused it to rain and He had no man to till the ground.” God is giving a more detailed look at the creation of Adam and Eve (though they were not given names until after they were expelled) in the Garden on the sixth day for clarity. This is not a so-called “eighth-day creation!”

(Gen2:6) But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

God had not yet sent rain and would not do so until the flood. A daily mist watered the earth. There is geological evidence that the entire earth had a tropical or subtropical climate at one time. In such climes, (I live in one) there is usually morning dew on the ground year round.

The Septuagint (LXX) says that a fountain came up and watered the entire ground. Most modern translations follow the LXX reading on this subject. The idea here is that there were waters under the surface of the earth as well as above the firmament. In the flood, we are told that “the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened” (Gen 7:11). The great fountains of the deep indicate that there was subterranean water in that day.

(Gen 2:7) And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Here is the tricky part. You must follow closely to get the point. I suggest you study these verses in depth so you can fully comprehend and realize what happened.

In 1:26 & 27, the word for man is adam with no article (the). It is the generic use of the word for man, meaning mankind. In 2:5, the word “not” makes this more specific than all mankind. God had no specific man to till the ground. But in this verse, 2:7, the Hebrew Words are eth ha adam meaning “this same man” or “this very man.” Who was this same man? We are talking about the man that was not around to till the ground. The man that God formed to till the ground was this very or same man, Adam. Adam was a specific man formed specifically to farm the land.This was the man, not just generic man or mankind. Hence the name Adam.

In 1:27, God created mankind. Here in 2:7, he formed this very man specifically to till the ground. The Hebrew word bara’ means to absolutely create, that is to create from nothing. Now the Hebrew word for ‘to form’, used in 2:7, is yatsar, which means to mold as a potter molds clay.

In summary, God created the heavens and earth. Stop. Sometime later (hours, days, months, or years, we do not know how long) He began the six days of creation, creating all as we see it now. He created the plants and animals, and mankind. Then God specifically directs us to the story of the family of Adam, through whom would come Messiah. From this point forward, the Bible sticks to the family of Adam. There is one diversion, and that is to show the family of Cain, which is separate from the line of Adam. After that short diversion, we get back to the line of Adam.

NOTE: All Hebrew and Greek words are normally transliterated. They are presented in their uninflected forms unless otherwise noted.

Updated 07/28/2011

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