The Bible does not come with a preface, various acknowledgements of who helped type the manuscript, a dedication to the wife and children of Moses, or an introduction. Moses did not record the first five books of the Bible with an apology for people worried about what others might think of the testimony of God to us. The first verse is just as it is. The Pentateuch was given to Moses by Yahweh for the benefit of all of mankind. Jesus said that salvation is from the Jews. When He said that, there wasn't a New Testament. Salvation from what though, some ask. You might be surprised.
When the rich man begged Abraham to let him warn his brothers about how he ended up in a place of thirst and torment he was told that even if someone came back from the dead they would not believe. He noted that the man's five brothers had Moses and the Prophets and if they didn't believe them, it would do no good to bring him back from the dead to warn them (Luke 16:19-31).
So here we are in the 21st century and God says that He created the universe. Some things are just true and this is one of them. The Bible is true and Jesus is the Living testimony of its truth. Not once did He pause and remark that most of the Bible is true except for such and such a passage. Jesus said He did not come to change one dot or stroke of the Law but to fulfill it. He noted to people that were reading the Scriptures that people read the Scriptures because they believed that it was Life to them and He agreed. He went on to say that the Scriptures that they were reading testified of Him and that in Him is Life, that from Him is Life, that He is Life for us, and that He is Life. He sent His Holy Spirit to us to comfort and tutor us. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit and the Father testify with Him that what He said is true.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
That is the first story of creation. Have you ever noticed how the next story that immediately follows it begins with things out of kilter? Did you ever wonder how come the first verse goes from a fait d' accompli to formlessness and a void? Ovid gathered stories from the known world and came up with a pretty fair reckoning of what people thought might have taken place up to the first century A.D. It is from a naturalistic, deterministic point of view. The ancients looked at God as an architect, taking a pre-existent amount of material in disarray and putting together a place we could inhabit. The Bible says that God created the heaven and the earth. The stories of the Sumerians and others start in synchronization with verse 2 of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. The chaos they speak of has Tiamat getting hacked into pieces to reform the earth that has dry land sticking up above sea level. The following is a synopsis of one account of the Last Great Destruction some 12,000 years ago.
"The heavens and earth had not yet been created, and since the name was supposed to be the same as the thing named, their names had not as yet been pronounced. A watery chaos alone existed, Mummu Tiamat, 'the chaos of the deep.' Out of the bosom of this chaos proceeded the gods as well as the created world. First came the primæval divinities, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, words of unknown meaning, and then An-sar and Ki-sar, 'the upper' and 'lower firmament.' Last of all were born the three supreme gods of the Babylonian faith, Ann the sky-god, Bel or Illil the lord of the ghost-world, and Ea the god of the river and sea.
"But before the younger gods could find a suitable habitation for themselves and their creation, it was necessary to destroy 'the dragon' of chaos with all her monstrous offspring. The task was undertaken by the Babylonian sun-god Merodach, the son of Ea, An-sar promising him victory, and the other gods providing for him his arms. The second tablet was occupied with an account of the preparations made to ensure the victory of light over darkness, and order over anarchy.
"The third tablet described the success of the god of light over the allies of Tiamat. Light was introduced into the world, and it only remained to destroy Tiamat herself...
"It will be seen from this that in its main outlines the Assyrian epic of the creation bears a striking resemblance to the account of it given in the first chapter of Genesis. In each case the history of the creation is divided into seven successive acts; in each case the present world has been preceded by a watery chaos. In fact the self-same word is used of this chaos in both the Biblical and Assyrian accounts--tehôm, Tiamat--the only difference being that in the Assyrian story 'the deep' has become a mythological personage, the mother of a chaotic brood."
(Sayce Records of the Past, New Series, Vol. I., pp. 128-131)
"The struggle, however, is not finished, for the demon of evil is living still and Bel has to fight the seven wicked storm-demons who darken the moon. He kills dragons and evil spirits, and the reappearance of divine intelligence in rational creatures is symbolised in the myth that Bel commanded one of the gods to cut off his, id est Bel's head, in order to mix the blood with the earth for the procreation of animals which should be able to endure the light...
When finally they met on the field of battle, Tiamat opened her considerable mouth as if to swallow Marduk and plunge him into the immeasurable deeps. Marduk rallied by casting one of the winds into her body, expanding her like a balloon. He then took his bow and shot an arrow into her belly, splitting her in half. Marduk cut her in two like a clam, and out of her carcass he made the heavens. The "clamshell" of heaven became a barrier to keep the waters from escaping, a parallel to the Genesis notion of a barrier or firmament. Marduk also fixed the constellations in the heavens. They, along with the moon, established the course of day and night as well as the seasons."
The "clamshell" of the Sumerians is the same thing as the canopy above the earth mentioned in the Bible. When a near earth object entered the atmosphere the canopy was split open and the heavens were seen for the first time as the Ice Age ended. Ice crystals and water showered down from the impact of a near earth object. Ultraviolet radiation and other forms of radiation without the canopy protecting people were introduced into the atmosphere for the first time in many thousands of years.
The creation stories from around the world seem to have a lot of similarities and take up things from an earth that pre-existed or a universe that already has the elements of time, space, and matter. It does not appear that the creation stories transcend this universe in terms of dimensionality as we experience it. The Bible begins with a statement that is brief and to the point that it is so obvious people miss it in a rush to get on with the story. God transcends the universe. The universe does not transcend the universe. Different planes of existence, the eleven dimensions of the universe that scientists have identified, the extra-dimensional realms that have not been identified, all that is within the universe came from God. It is somewhat difficult to accept statements from the point of view of God that do not encompass our experiential knowledge. Our point of view is that there is a heaven and earth. God's point of view is that He created them. Our point of view is from that of a finite point in time. The seconds passing reading the last sentence are gone. While it can be granted that we are made of the dust of the earth and that dust is related to the dust of the stars, it had a beginning at a point when time began. All of the permutations of existence in time, space, and matter have One Source. Five billion years ago an hour was different than it is now. A million years ago an hour was not the same length of time as it is now. Every nano-second we exist time has a new meaning and the reference points in the universe are changing as the distance between space and matter in the universe becomes greater. This is easy to see from looking at the difference from the time it takes for a year to transpire on earth as opposed to that of Pluto. How long a minute is at sea level is different than it is on the top of Mount Everest. The reference point is God who transcends time. The reference point is in Him and He is Eternity. Humans do not share this reference point as a part of everyday experience. It is logical that only God can and does. The term "righteousness" is more accurately translated into English as "rightwiseness". It means the ultimate reference point is God. The universe and any element of it is measured against the "Orthogonal Straight-Edge", God. It is difficult to guess how time might stack up against or in terms of Eternity. God is Eternity as well as being Righteousness. God's story that He decided to share with us is that He created the heaven and the universe.
People find themselves at odds with taking God's Word for things from time to time. In fear, we recoil from what He has said and want to do something to alleviate the distress that we feel if Truth clashes with our point of view based on what we have been told or learned from experiential knowledge. As a scientist it is clear that people have trouble with information that is new. The idea of continental drift was so radical that it was rejected for a long time by geologists. With the advent of computers in the early 1970's, people decided to use them to model the way continents formed and finally the idea of continental drift was accepted and is now taken for granted. You may believe what I am writing is true. In science things have to have proof. One theory may sound as plausible as another for the existence of observable phenomenon. Believing that the Pre-Cambrian System in Geology was a time when no life existed on the planet does not make it so. This System is marked by containing evidence of only crystalline rocks. Small marine animals called ostracodes were found in Pre-Cambrian sediments that were thought to have been formed before life was possible on the planet. In 1954 Barghoorn found what looked to be a one-celled pro-caryotic life form and declared it to be the evidence of how life began on the planet. As it turns out the evidence was a stretch and then the ostracodes were found in older sediments. Proving something scientifically using the scientific method is not easy to do.
In doing spore counts for an area, statistically 1,000 counts should represent what can be expected for a nearly infinite number of counts. The trouble with that is the fact that earth processes are not static and going 50 feet away and taking new samples will yield a completely different count. Inferring what must have been true when the sediments were deposited involves knowing a lot of other factors to get an idea of what a particular time horizon was like in a limited area. The area may only be a square mile or after enough investigation it may be found that it includes all of the land mass of the earth. Finding shark's teeth in freshwater stream channel deposits suggests that they may have lived at least close enough to the ancient river for their teeth to have ended up there. Were they limited to the mouth of the delta or were they able to live inland to the stream's source? When a major event occurred such as a near earth object wiping out almost all life, did only shark's that could survive in saltwater remain? To find out evidence to prove that requires sediments to look at that may no longer exist due to erosion for millions of years.
Knowing the difference between absolute truth, observably provable truth, experimentally provable truth, probably provable truth, cryptographically provable truth, and statistically provable truth is useful in getting at something you want to know. How well do you want to know that something is true? In the 1800's Darwin came along and discredited two camps of thinkers in the academic world as best as he was able. There was a raging fight between Catastrophists and Gradualists in explaining earth processes. The Gradualists won out as evolution became the explanation for everything. That worked so well that Theology was sent to the back bench of academia almost immediately. Almost anything that could be explained had to be explained in scientific, naturalistic, reductionist, and gradualistic terms to get anywhere. People named this way at looking at things called it evolution. People are social beings and as such this model was tried out with social systems to the point that political and economic systems enforced this way of getting at things. The experiment in the 20th century with this model applied to societies on a national level was a dismal failure even with draconian enforcement by places such as the Soviet Union. Societies that did not try a pure model divorced completely from inclusion of Theology and Catastrophism did better at getting along. One society based on a hybrid of the Occult-Folkway and Evolution model was short-lived for very good reasons. It was Nazi Germany. The societies that chose Theology as the predominate model for explaining reality and included Evolution fared better. One country that represents this model for doing things is the United States although there are many countries that have tried it out. Major variants still exist in the world that work on this model. It appears that Occult-Folkway based societies tend to destroy a lot of things including people. This is in part or perhaps wholly because God is not only rejected but the result is that one person emerges as all-powerful. This happened with the Caesars, Alexander the Great, Nebuchadnezzar, and Xerxes. Hitler thought it might work out well for him but found out the hard way it does not, despite warnings contained in the Bible. However sincerely interested in improving things for mankind Alexander the Great was, it did not matter. Something terrible happens when we get too close to the Abyss. The first thing we want to do is reject absolute truth when we are getting along nicely in life. The trouble is that absolute truth comes from one place only, and that is God.
Looking for dark corners in the bedroom to reveal some secret knowledge and getting around God and His Truth has never been a good idea. If you are getting some kind of solid response from the shirt you had draped on the back of a chair that now looks like Genghis Khan at 3 a.m. several things could be going on with that, none of which are good. Sometimes it ends people up on the front page of newspapers for having done something desperately horrible. If something like this happens, the first thing to do is ignore it and start praying, check your diet, talk to a friend, and perhaps seek counseling. Despite the results of the larger models based on a national level, people tend to live out reality on a daily basis and experience life personally. Seeing the big picture is not so easy. The Bible warns over and over that listening to God is the best plan on a personal, national, and global level. Knowing the difference between the kinds of truth that there are available to us is therefore important on the personal level, national level, and global level. Some people see the value of this and some do not to varying degrees. Plumbing the depths of destructive and dysfunctional behaviors has the result of destruction as its end product. That seems obvious but then there are Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Sadaam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, who tried it out or are trying it out. One of the nice things about science is it gives the false security that nothing bad can happen playing with test tubes or writing out long mathematical equations. The atomic bomb and biological warfare would seem to be proof that this in not always the case but people tend to forget remarkably easy.
It might seem as though the time spent going over the first verse of Genesis Chapter One is superfluous. Judging by the responses from people that live day to day and how we are getting along on earth, it is not. The things being compared are destruction, chaos, creation, and salvation. Part of creation is regeneration and the other part is salvation. These things seem good and are good. Part of chaos is destruction and a return to chaos. This is evil and experiencing it is harmful to things, including people. Knowing the difference between the kinds of truth becomes important to people sooner or later. Knowing where and how they fit in with reality is important as well. It is wondrous that people automatically reject absolute truth until we encounter a confidence man that dangles something in front of us that seems true but will only lead us to giving him what he wants from us. Looking for the con in the Bible blinds people to what is contained in it, absolute truth, Truth. Letting other people read it and tell you what it means is fraught with danger as there are religious con men all around. Looking for the formula to make a new alloy is probably not applicable to the Bible. Likewise, getting the details about what happened in one specific time period of a geologic System may not be best sought in the Bible. The vital information about creation, salvation, and related topics is there. A lot of people can walk and chew gum at the same time, some cannot. Some people can do science and trust the Bible, a lot of people cannot. If you want to find the Truth, it is there and there is information to help decide the difference between the different kinds of truth to help people out.
Jesus said that new wineskins are needed for new wine. If new wine is put into old wineskins that have already been stretched as far as possible already, they will burst when new wine is put into them. The point of view of God is so different from that of mankind that we have to become new wineskins to have new wine put in us without bursting. That bursting thing causes the distress and people have a natural aversion to bursting, either physically or mentally or spiritually. Reading the first line of the Bible causes that distress and sometimes people automatically skip over it utilizing denial as an automatic way of dealing with it. As our point of view encompasses information from various sources it is possible to come back to the first verse of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis and use learned experiential or theoretical information to blind ourselves to the denial of the Truth from God's point of view. Claiming the "right" to hold a contrary point of view seems a sufficient substitute for dealing with the validity of the points of view as apposites or opposites. The right for anyone to think and believe what we want is readily ceded as if that settles something other than the right to think or believe what we want. Intuitively or determinately people call upon free will as ours to claim as if the subject at hand consists of a violation of free will. We find out from experience or later in the Bible that mankind has free will and it is possible to see that claiming a right to think or believe something is a false refuge and shield to volitionally deny the truth. Volition does not imply or explicitly demonstrate unity with the Truth by its inherent nature, although many like to live as if that is the case. The Unity with the Truth is Truth. Jesus said that the Father is Truth and Spirit. In dealing with denial, a favorite method is to claim that Unity is the same thing as a circular argument. Jesus said that we would know the Truth and the Truth will set us free. Circles confine and constrain as do spheres.
Then, there is the fact that a better refuge can always be sought in avoiding things that have to do with Faith. The accusation that the Truth demands "blind faith" of us is just that, an accusation. Faith is a gift from God and the matter wrestled with is really not a matter of the Faith of a Christian in this sense of the word. Rather it is a matter of belief. People reasonably concluded in a village that because of the famine from 1517 to 1522 in Europe that they could not obtain food. A lot of them died because they thought famine was widespread. Their belief that no relief could be sought and found based on limited reports of the condition of things round about ended in starvation in the village. As it turns out, there was a village within a day's walk that had plenty of food. What we believe matters and the villagers put faith in their belief. Unexamined belief can prove to be deadly. This Faith that is attacked is different from the natural world's beliefs. It is a matter of Whom we believe in, not what we believe. When we first believe, we receive Faith. That Faith is from God, not beliefs based on local reports from round about us. Another favorite is to make random chance into a god and attribute everything to that. Random chance presupposes no god other than it and that there is no God. The antiseptically minded imagination that culls possibilities out deterministically violates the belief based on random chance and is forced to become its own god with every other mind blinded in this schemata. Again, circles and spheres confine. It boils down that some of the most formidable arguments mustered against God rely on the thought because the opponents of God are unaware of Him, then others cannot be aware of Him either. There is only one reason to believe something is true and that is because it is true. Relativism is a kind of arrogance that discounts God precisely because He is Truth. Everything is relative until the Relativist's toes are stepped on and suddenly something becomes true for them. It is akin to the people who think this world is an illusion. Johnson suggested the believers in that drop a brick on their toes to test it out. From our point of view the world exists and it is helpful that experiential reality is subject to things such as the five senses. Escaping God or trying to become our own god is fruitless, but it does amuse some people for a long time.
Some time spent on the relevance of God's direct revelation to mankind may be fruitful. Teachers in Christendom have among them those who do not accept the witness of the Bible as true. They find a scrap of paper, a cuneiform tablet, a book, a library full of books or tablets and immediately think it contains the "proof" that we were lied to and teach others not to believe the Bible, before even finding out the facts of the matter. They find a "priestly" text or a differing exegesis from that which is commonly understood and presuppose it amounts to "proof". Conspiracy theorists think that someone somewhere is holding out on us and that people will someday find out that there is no God and that the Bible is not true. Fear and loathing of the Truth takes on different forms and people can take Scriptures for their destruction, just a Peter said.
15And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; 16As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.
II Peter 3:15-16
That is not the plan here. The subject of the resources and observations is vanity as concerns destruction. Vanity has to do with destruction resulting in nothingness. Destruction is part of the physical history of the earth and people have been destroyed physically. The destruction of souls, the mental well-being of people, is part of the history of people. Breaking the spirit of people has been a favorite pastime of some and still is. That happens everyday, all day, all over the world. If things are not going badly for others, there are those who will correct that situation. The first verse of the Bible states that God created the universe, an act of creation, inferring that God is The Creator. The next verse is about destruction. As it turns out, God gave the direct revelation to mankind through Moses that the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. The earth that God created was in a state of chaos and people that might have been around were in darkness. Patterson says that:
"This formlessness describes an earth wrecked by divine judgment (Isaiah 34:11; Jeremiah 4:23)."1
A catastrophe happened that had something to do with the judgment of God and this had an impact the earth. It does not make sense that things were created and no time lapsed until there was a reduction of the earth to a different state of being. Criswell says:
"Proponents of the 'Gap Theory' translate the Hebrew word hayetah as 'became' instead of 'was' (v. 2). According to this translation, verse 1 describes an original creation of God (Job 38:6; John 1:3; Hebrews 11:3), and verse 2 explains that the earth "became" chaos. Verse 2 is interpreted negatively as a description of the earth under judgment (conferer Isaiah 24:11; 34:11; 45:18; Jeremiah 4:24–26), a state resulting from the expulsion of Satan from heaven (Isaiah 14:12–17; Ezekiel 28:11–19; II Peter 2:4; Jude 6). Therefore, there is an indeterminable gap of time between verses 1 and 2. The 'six days' of creation (verses 3–31) describe God’s re-creation of the chaotic earth."2
According to Patterson:
"Some have theorized that the creation of the heavens and earth described in verse 1 was destroyed in the judgment of Lucifer (see Isaiah 14; Ezekiel 23). This 'Gap Theory' assumes a stretch of time between verses 1 and 2; verse 2 then begins the story of the re-creation."3
People have taken the obvious implication of the difference between the first verse that states God created and second verse of the Bible describing a state of Chaos and filled the gap with a lot of things for a number of reasons. In cases of ties in competing theories as to what might have went on with something the Bible is the tie-breaker. The testimony of the Truth is its own defense. Because there were no televisions mentioned in the Bible does not preclude their existence today. The Bible gives testimony to the fact that something happened between the time of creation and when the earth was in a state of disarray and dark. God in fact points out that it was He Who hacked the Rahab into pieces, not one of the personifications or anthropomorphisms. That fact alone suggests something happened. J. Vernon McGee has this to say about the theologians agreements and disagreements about this.
"The first verse of Genesis tells us that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That is how it all began. But then the next verse: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2) is considered by some to describe the act of creation. My friend, I don’t think that God has told us how he did the creating. I believe this second verse suggests the gap theory—that God created the heaven and the earth and then there followed a space of time. Something happened to that original creation. The earth became without form and void. I recognize that this theory has been largely abandoned, but I still hold it in spite of what these sharp young men are writing today. My contention is that God has not told how He created. We just don’t know—neither scientist nor theologian knows. I like the question God asked Job: 'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? …' (Job 38:4). That is a question which God can ask every individual. No one has the answer.
Also I like the question Agur asks. 'Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?' Just think—God holds the winds just like we might hold some article in our hand. What a picture that is! Man knows very little about these things. In that same passage where the Lord Jesus said He was the One who came down from heaven, He also said, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth …' (John 3:8). This is a tremendous thought."4
