Day 2: God Over Seas and Skies
Time, space, matter, and energy are all creatures and servants of God. The ancients didn’t need to know that like we moderns do. For them, it was those forces of nature that had been personified into gods. That will be an important difference. As one biblical scholar said, Genesis 1 was not written to counter modern theories of cosmology or biological evolution. However, “it was written in the light of rival descriptions of creation.”1 Think about it. As Israel was coming out of Egypt and entering the Promise Land, the Lord impressed upon Moses—who was already well-educated on the many creation and flood narratives that existed among their new pagan neighbors—that the people would be at times tempted by these rivals to worship them; but at the very least, they would be intimidated by these rivals gods.
And in one of those rival religious origin-stories, out of the Akkadian civilization to the East, in a book called the Enuma Elish, it was believed that the first two gods named Apsu and Tiamat, reproduced divine offspring from their abode in the waters under the earth.2 Long story short, a power struggle emerges, Apsu is killed and Tiamat seeks revenge. A hero steps forward named Marduk, and he becomes the chief god. He splits Tiamat’s body in two, forming the heavens with one half and the earth with the other. Back in Canaan, their chief god was Baal and he was thought to ride on the clouds and give rain to the land. While we don’t have a creation account among their texts, which are called Ugaritic. However, what we do have shows the same kind of war between this god and his nemesis, the sea god Yam.
The true God made the seas.
The true God made the skies.
If the God who made the stuff containing one’s gods is not one’s ‘god’, then the message here is quite simply to change your ‘god.’ This is as true for the modern materialist or postmodern relativist, as it was for the ancient polytheist.
The True God Made the Seas.
To see what God is showing Moses at the shorelines of time, let’s rewind back to verse 2 for that detail I mentioned would wait for this week: ‘And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters’ (v. 2). This is a participle form of the verb rachaph (רָחַף), which is used only one other time in the Hebrew canon. That comes in Deuteronomy 32:11:
“Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions.”
It should be noted that this too is a figure of divine activity: namely, God’s care over Israel. Clearly it is figurative language. While the image of the bird in the Deuteronomy text speaks to God’s encircling Israel as it would have been prey for the wild beasts otherwise, the Genesis 1:2 usage is more clearly emphasizing divine sovereignty over the waters.3
There have been attempts to say that the Hebrew רוח should be translated as “wind” that hovers over the waters. The most immediate problem with that is that it says—וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים clearly “the Spirit of God.” But notice also that, up until this point, everything within the sphere of earth itself is water. Light and darkness are beyond, as that sphere is rotating. They had already been separated, but they are separated everywhere in the cosmos, not simply on earth. So now we are ready for the second separation.
“And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so” (vv. 6-7).
In his book, Creation and Change, Douglas Kelly links verse 2 with these: “It would be logical to assume that the term ‘waters’ refers to the same substance as ‘the deep.’ This then confirms the idea that we must not think of the earth in its original state as being in a firm or solid condition’”4 Augustine comes to the same conclusion.5 For the waters now above, Calvin’s commentary bursts the bubble of our speculation by arguing that this is nothing more than the clouds which contain the rain.6 After all, nowhere in this verse does it say that there was anything close to an equal amount of water above as the water below.7 Whatever the waters above, we know from the whole Bible that the sea below symbolized death, judgment, and the underworld. Perhaps some of that was the memory of the Flood. More obviously it was a place where many sailors lost their lives. The waters are also often a figure for troubles (Ps. 42:7; 69:2, 14, 15).
All of this may explain why it says of the new heavens and new earth, that, “the sea was no more” (Rev. 21:1). When God revealed Himself to Job, He asks,
“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?” (Job 38:8-11)
But notice the same trio as in Day 1? God decreed, divided, and defined. First, to the decree. These other so-called gods came from the water. These other gods work in the water department. But then other gods work in the earthquake department. Still others oversee war. Others inspire poets and others deliver justice. And one for one tribe and one for another. And so on, and so on—until you come to the point where you realize that these start to sound like minimum wage deities who have
The True God Made the Skies.
The word raqia can be rendered as “an extended surface” or “expanse” or “plate” or “firmament” or “dome” or “vault” or even “space.”8 The verb form (רָקַע) used in one context can mean “spread out” in Isa. 42:5, 44:24, Ps. 136:6, and in another for “hammer out” in Ex. 39:3, Num. 17:4, Isa. 40:19, Jer. 10:9. In that latter usage especially, the idea is to hammer out something of a metal substance into plates.9 One example:
“Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a cast metal mirror?” (Job 37:18)10
So the Old-Earth view will tend to see this in the more figurative and poetic sense of a hammered out “dome” of sorts, so that Moses is not speaking in a scientific way. The Young-Earth view will opt for a more literal spreading out of one physical object or sphere from another, which for many would mean that this is the canopy that existed prior to the Flood. A looser sense has been preferred by most since the world can mean a few things, like what we said about the “heavens” in verse 1.11 Calvin says here,
“Moreover, the word רקיע, (rakia,) comprehends not only the whole region of the air, but whatever is open above us: as the word heaven is sometimes understood by the Latins. Thus the arrangement, as well of the heavens as of the lower atmosphere, is called רקיע, (rakia,) without discrimination between them, but sometimes the word signifies both together, sometimes one part only.”12
Regardless of how one understands that outermost “layer” or “surface” of the earth’s atmosphere, the word heaven (שמים) used now in verse 8 is being used this time in its more physical connotation, which is why many will opt for the English word sky. Thus when the Psalmist commands, “Praise him … you waters above the heavens!” (Ps. 148:4), this is in a section where all things in creation—physical things—are being summoned into corporate worship.
Why doesn’t God say “It was good” during Day 2? Calvin’s surmises that, “perhaps because there was no advantage from it till the terrestrial waters were gathered into their proper place, which was done on the next day, and therefore it is there twice repeated.”13
So to summarize, the ancients looked to the sea with dread, and looked to the sky with desperation. From one they hid to spare their lives; from the other they plead to nourish their crops and sustain their lives. Fear of the sea; faith in the sky. Apart from the true God, it’s a short step from that fear and that faith to turning those forces of nature into a divine presence. But that’s demon worship. So is the attempt to explain that away. Feuerbach and Freud were right that human beings project their hopes and fears into a superlative degree of their own personalities. But their explanations were too shallow. Correction—sinful human beings (idolaters), being cut off from true worship, need to project precisely because we are worshiping beings by nature. We are not a sufficient reference point for ourselves. So Paul tells us that “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man” (Rom. 1:23) and so on with other parts of creation. There is something infinitely more terrifying than a storm at sea, as the disciples found out in the boat with Jesus.
Practical Use of This Doctrine
Use 1. Admonition. This passage put the children of Israel on notice about these so-called “gods.” God in effect puts all of these neighboring deities in a spiritual zoo, behind the glass cases of sky and sea. They are caged. They are not to be feared. They are to be mocked. Anyone who worships them is to be pitied. Today we do not fear the sea like the ancients did; but we are no different than them in this. What we do fear, we worship. Let me explain that. First, in a view from their world, the prophet Isaiah was told by God, as the mighty Assyrian armies were conquering nation after nation:
“Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” (Isa. 8:12-13).
What we fear the most—if it begins to consume us—begins to take the place of God. Not many of us fear the mere forces of nature like that. However, we are confronted with the fears of man-made threats that seem to reach god-like capacities. God the Creator, hovers over all of that too. Even nuclear weapons? Even genetically-manipulated substances? Even AI? Who do you fear? God separates and sets limits for and holds back whatever He wants to hold back, and, just as He said to Job about the literal seas, so He says to that tidal wave of violence and depravity in our day—“Thus far shall you come, and no farther,” until it is the time He has decreed to use those things for judgment.
Use 2. Consolation. We do not ponder deeply enough the power of God in creation, nor the implications of that power toward the new creation. Even the sea of judgment is the servant of God.
“And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them” (Rev. 20:13).
The sea—As there He drown Pharaoh and his armies chasing the children of God; so as the shame of our sin pursues us—and the devil, who Pharaoh represents from that ancient house of bondage—so the Lord will cause the depths of the earth to swallow up the accuser. He will separate the new world from the old as far as He has separated you from your sins—that is, “as far as the east is from the west” (Ps. 103:12), and “You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” (Mic. 7:19). The One with the power to create all things by His word has all power to drive away the most evil things forever.
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1. Tremper Longman, How to Read Genesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 72.
2. The Egyptian religion that Israel was already familiar with also had Amon-Re emerging from the waters with the rest of creation.
3. Kelly adds that this detail about the Spirit’s activity “is the direct antithesis of any sort of philosophical Deism or theological Dualism, both of which assume a vast gap between the living God and the space-time cosmos” (Creation and Change, 106).
4. Kelly, Creation and Change, 105.
5. Augustine, On Genesis, I.5.9 [28]
6. Calvin, Commentaries, I:80.
7. Morris argues that this “probably constituted a vast blanket of water vapor above the troposphere and possibly above the stratosphere as well, in the high-temperature region now known as the ionosphere, and extending far into space. They could not have been the clouds of water droplets which now float in the atmosphere, because the Scripture says they were ‘above the firmament’” (The Genesis Record, 59).
8. Morris, The Genesis Record, 58.
9. William L. Holladay, A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 347
10. Derek Kidner goes as far to say that the Job 37 passage “shows that we are not meant to rarefy this word into ‘expanse’ or ‘atmosphere’” — Genesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1967), 52. This seems like an extreme inference from a single other passage, and that in the poetic genre.
11. The Canopy View is not the only perspective among Young Earthers. James Jordan wrote, “On the second day God took some of the earthly waters up above the firmament, and this can only mean they were taken into the angelic heavens. Since the stars were placed in the firmament, the waters must be beyond the stars. Thus, when heaven is opened in the Bible, we see an ocean there (Ezek. 1:22; Rev. 4:6)” — Creation in Six Days: A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 1999), 100.
12. Calvin, Commentaries, I:79.
13. Calvin, Commentaries, I:81.
