Another writer much closer to our own time and in our own language famously wrote that,

“All the world is a stage;

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.”1

Whether he intended it so theologically or not, Shakespeare was right—except for that “merely players” part. We are quite real moral actors. God has created the world as a stage for His glory, and, as I’ve already introduced, when we arrive at the third day, it is the last of the days in which God was setting up the stages for those actors that will be called out on Days 4 through 6. But here, we have something that now resembles a real ground to stand on.

• Land — the Proving Ground

• Vegetation — the Abundant Provision

Day 3 of creation teaches us that God made a proving ground with all systems harmonious and resources sufficient.

Land — the Proving Ground

The word for LAND here is different than “earth” or general “land” (אֶרֶץ), but is a more specific word for ‘dry land’ (יַבָּשָׂה). This is the third of those three separations I mentioned. First, God separated light from darkness; second, God separated waters above from waters below; now third, God separated those waters below into oceans and ‘Seas’ (v. 10) by means of the dry land. That is what it means that they are now ‘gathered together into one place’ (v. 9).2 Naturally they were already the singular substance, but by “one place” it is now in contrast to the land.3 Also, do not miss that of both land and sea it repeats ‘God called the dry land Earth … [and] called Seas’ (v. 10).4 Remember how this implies dominion. God is planting the flag of heaven in the first soil of earth and in fact all of it.

“The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers” (Ps. 24:1).

DRY LAND recalls the resolution to the Flood—which, remember, is past for the first audience of this book. The most obvious point here is to show God’s care for man. Recalling the fear of the sea, this is now a contrast:

“He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth” (Ps. 104:5-9).

That Psalm seems to make the idea of God’s goodness to creation flow forth like those waters that He describes. The very next words are: “You make springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills; they give drink to every beast of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst” (Ps. 104:10-11; cf. Jer. 5:22). So though smaller bodies of water—rivers, lakes, and streams, are not mentioned on Day 3 in the Genesis text, they are very much implied. God has made the land for man. That means that God has ordered both His world and its history harmoniously, such that mankind will always have a sufficient portion of land, and the water will also be channeled and turned into his servant as well.

But right from the start, the expression “the land” immediately begins to take on the connotations of a very real stage. So Moses goes back to the use of the word אֶ֔רֶץ for Earth as the name God called the dry land. In other words, this isn’t just a topographical detail. The reason for this dry land is that stage, that territory, that domain. This is the language that remains throughout the Bible:

“For the upright will inhabit the land, and those with integrity will remain in it, but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous will be rooted out of it” (Prov. 2:21-22).

This does not feature here in Chapter 1 as it begins to in Chapter 2, but I mention it in passing because we interpret Scripture in light of Scripture. This is what the land is for. This is why the expression “foundations of the earth” (Ps. 102:25; Job 38:4; Zech. 12:1; Isa. 48:13) is often used in the Bible for the basic land masses. It’s less about some ancient way of speaking about the earth geologically and more about the land as a stage of history and man’s moral action.

As Matthew Henry put it,

“We who, to this day, enjoy the benefit of the dry land … must own ourselves tenants to, and dependents upon, that God whose hands formed the dry land, Ps. 95:5; Jonah 1:9.”5

Vegetation — the Abundant Provision

Let’s get an obstacle out of the way first. It is often pointed out by skeptics of the Bible that plant life is said to begin on Day 3 here in Genesis 1, and yet in Genesis 2, it says,

“When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground” (2:5-6).

First, the most important piece of context in all proposed resolutions is to note that Genesis 1 is what may be called the “cosmological” account and Genesis 2 the “anthropological” account of creation. Remember this when we get to man and woman. The same kind of objection comes up there. But, in other words, Chapter 2 provides a kind of zoomed-in instant replay of sorts to Day 6. So how does that help with plant life? In that second account, the focus on Adam’s vocation is only that the vegetation became cultivated at this time.

The Hebrew of 1:11-12 speaks of “seeding a seed” (מַזְרִ֣יעַ זֶ֔רַע)—though most English translations say “seed-bearing plants” or “plants yielding seed”; and then the words for “grass” (דֶּ֔שֶׁא) and “herb” (עֵ֚שֶׂב) are here, whereas the word for “bush” (שִׂ֣יחַ) is used in 2:5, so it differs. So it is reasonable to take the latter as the cultivated version of the plants first created on Day 3. When understood in this context of Adam “as gardener,” the two passages fit perfectly. Chapter 1 (Day 3) shows God creating all plant life at its basic level, and Chapter 2 (verse 5) zooms in to the beginning of the human cultivation of that plant life.

But what else are we told about Day 3? First, just as we will see with the animal kingdom, so with the plant kingdom, we have genus and species, and each species are called a ‘kind’ (מִין),6 signifying adaptation but always with the limitations of the genome of that population. In other words, you have a framework for microevolution but not macroevolution, something we’ll say more about when we get to the animals. Second, the earth is the material cause and what we now call DNA, but which the Bible is content to call its ‘seed’ (זֶרַע), which information is the formal cause. But notice that God is still speaking, ‘Let the earth … yielding seed’ (v. 11). So you have the in-forming Word of God supplying the intelligent design to all of these first living organisms. Third, once again we interpret Scripture by Scripture, and we notice that down in 1:29-30 that the purpose of this vegetation and fruit is to serve man as food.

The purpose of showing vegetation and fruit being brought forth on land and for those actors of the stage of Day 6 is a picture of what we call in biology a symbiotic relationship—that is a living arrangement by which two or more species benefit from something that the other has. Bees and flowers are an obvious example. So the wisdom of God is not only shown in the propagation of species, but in the inter-dependence of all the systems of nature, including between living organisms and non-living materials: or what we call an ecosphere.   

Again do not miss the conclusion of God’s activities on this third day—a second time on this day He says what? ‘God saw that it was good’ (vv. 10, 12). Everything about that land-stage: GOOD. Everything about that vegetation: GOOD.

Practical Use of This Doctrine

Use 1. Correction. Those who worship nature treat the image of God as an invader, an unwelcome and unnatural germ—incompatible with earth’s resources. Those who drove environmentalism to its extremes in the previous generation have been Pantheistic in their world view: in other words, they believe that Nature is divine. As one of their leaders has said, “Unless the need were urgent, I could no more sink the blade of an ax into the tissues of a living tree than I could drive it into the flesh of a fellow human.”7 Or another who said,

“A human life has no more intrinsic value than an individual grizzly bear life. If it came down to a confrontation between a grizzly and a friend, I’m not sure whose side I would be on. But I do know humans are a disease, a cancer on nature.”8

Ironically, for all their “nature-worshiping” talk, the naturalistic environmentalist is actually a Gnostic. He or she hates real Nature and the God who made it. God made it good and made good for mankind. The radical environmentalist believes that something un-natural needs to step in, some alteration of God’s design, and that something always winds up framing mankind as the problem scheduled for eradication.

Use 2. Exhortation. If you find yourself in a time and place in which the anti-Christ elite are poised to cut humanity off from natural resources—whether natural food, medicine, or even air and water—know that God has designed the earth in a way similar to how He has designed the human body. Now, it is true that limbs don’t grow back; but skin and hair do grow back, and when we get our blood drawn, our veins heal by clotting over, and the liver regenerates itself whenever you take a portion out; and of course we sweat when we have a fever so that the body maintains homeostasis.

Right here in one’s own local community is soil and water and vegetation (and we haven’t gotten to the animals yet) that God has stocked the earth with. Why? Ultimately, it is to be dependent on Him, rather than dependent on some Christ-hating elite. 

Use 3. Consolation. If God made the whole creation to speak about Himself, much more intensified is that glory in creation that speaks about His Son’s work in the gospel. So God made WATER with baptism in mind. God made the FRUIT of the vine with the wine of communion in view. God made seed, each after its kind, knowing that He would put an imperishable seed to bring His own kind to life by the Spirit. And God made forests with each TREE as a type of those three trees that would stand out the most—one at the beginning of the story, a Tree of Life, another at the end of the story, the forever Tree of Life, and then one in the middle, which was a tree of death. And yet, it would be that one in the middle where He would send His Son to hang upon it as a curse for us. And God made LAND to bring in and then evict Adam and then to bring in and evict Israel, and on a micro-level every world empire and tribe, including us (no one was exempt from this pattern). In fact, the only One who was faithful on the land was driven out for us, as Hebrews tells us,

“For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood” (13:11-12).

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1. Jaques in William Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act II, Scene 7

2. Morris summarizes the Young-Earth view that will naturally be on the minds of many as they read these words: “These were, of course, not the same as our present seas, since the antediluvian arrangement of continental and marine areas was completely changed at the time of the Flood” (The Genesis Record, 62).

3. Augustine replies to the Manichean mockery about this—namely, “If the whole world was full of water, how could the waters be collected into one?”—as follows: “The very collecting together into one, you see, is the formation of these waters which we can see and touch” (On Genesis, I.12,18 [34]). In short, the water was previously in a more primitive form.

4. Wenham notes that the “LXX’s attempt to add missing formulae in v 10 is probably not original” (Genesis 1-15, 20).

5. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991), 5.

6. The word מִין is evidently “broad enough to allow ‘species’ as well as ‘genus, family, order.’” Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 126.

7. Edward Abbey, “The Crooked Wood,” Audubon 77 (November 1975), 25.

8. Quoted by Douglas S. Looney, “Protector or Provocateur?” Sports Illustrated, 27 May 1991, 54; from Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), 54