A WORD TO THE WISE: sky

Monday, August 1, 2016

Days 4& 5, Blogging Genesis: PAINT THE SKY

Genesis 1: 14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years;

15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.

16 God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also.

17 God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,

18 and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.

19 There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

In Genesis 1:3, on the 1^st Creation day, God speaks forth light (day and night), but He doesn’t create the stars, sun, or moon until the fourth day, verse 14. How could there be light without the sources of light? It doesn’t make sense; except that it does.

No human body witnessed Creation in real time. The first chapters of the Bible, like the last chapters of the Bible, had to be delivered by supernatural revelation. God showed the original author of Genesis a vision.

By the 3rd day, the author of Genesis (traditionally considered to be Moses) could see vegetation spreading, sea creatures, birds, and birdlike creatures, not to mention the unseen microbes all breathed. The respiration of billions of living beings ascended into the firmament and transformed the sky.

Oxygen and carbon dioxide displaced other elements in the air. Water vapor exchanged between sky and sea, pushed back the prehistoric haze. From evening to morning on the 4^th day, the sky became clearer and clearer. Stars appeared in the dark expanse of night. The larger light of the now clearly visible moon ruled the night. The Earth turned, the firmament lit, and the sun rose.

On the 1^st day of the Creation vision, Moses saw light coalesce in space and watched night vaguely shift to day under the thick canopy of Earth’s early atmosphere. On the 4^th day, Moses saw what the lights in space looked like when the firmament above was clear enough to refract their light through an oxygen rich atmosphere filled with water vapor.

Scripture doesn’t provide properly technical explanations of oxygenation, atmospheric optics, or light refraction. In the Biblical text, Moses didn’t distinguish between the astronomical movements of the sun as an independent star in space and the optical illusion of the sun’s progress across the sky created by the rotation of the Earth in orbit. Apparently God didn’t explain that to him in 1352? B.C.

I don’t fault Moses for that. Nobody explained it to me until 1979 A.D.

The “evolution” of light in Genesis isn’t a contradiction. It’s the accurate testimony of a witness by vision who did what every scholar has ever done, what scholars today still do: Moses used the words he knew to accurately describe the world God showed him.

Life yet to come would enjoy sunsets, sunrises, starry nights, and moonlit skies because on the 4^th day, the breath of life painted the sky.

Oh, yeah. That was good.

---Anderson T. Graves II is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama; executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO); and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

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Wednesday, July 27, 2016

SKY, SEA, & LAND: DAYS TWO & THREE

Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

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.

God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. (Genesis 1: 6-8)

Asteroid impacts churned the surface of the Earth, and volcanoes spewed out the insides of the world. Gas, dust, and star-stuff blew into the sky, scorching, trying to burn air away, but the sky was so heavy. The dense atmosphere weighted down the boiling seas of poisoned water and liquid rock, imprisoning oxygen in the toxic earth. The world was suffocating, so God spoke.

Sky and sea ceased their battle. They exchanged elements. Methane above for oxygen below. O₂ for CO₂. The atmosphere slackened, and the liquid surfaces of the Earth calmed.

The lighter sky gave the earth some space, room to breathe, time to cool off. The waters above met the waters below in peace and marked out an expansive, demilitarized zone on the surface of the earth.

But the author of Genesis noted in verses 6-8, on the 2^nd day of the vision, God didn’t declare His work to be good. (Yes, I’ll wait while you read it again.)

On the 2^nd day, the world was all sky and sea, but the life God planned needed more.

Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so.

God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1: 9-10)

Sky, sea, AND land. Now, that was good.

It took two days for the author of Genesis to visualize how God had prepared the world to support the full complexity of life.

Or to think of it another way, God showed the author (and us) that some good works require more time. To do THIS thing right, to do it good, you may have to work twice as hard, twice as long as you did the previous time.

Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”

One land?

In 1912, Alfred Wegner proposed the ridiculous idea that the continents were floating away from one another, AND in the distant past, all land had been connected in a single supercontinent. The consensus of the world’s scientists was that Wegner was an idiot.

The consensus of the world’s scientists was wrong.

In the 1960’s the new science of plate tectonics “discovered” that long ago, the waters below the heavens were gathered into one place so that the dry land, earth, appeared as a single mass.

Light, heavens, sea, and now, land. Sunlight, air, water, and soil: all the things plants need to grow. Microbes were fruitful and they multiplied. One cell became many until there were enough cells together for Moses to see them sprouting with his naked eye. Since the invention of the microscope 400 years ago, we have known by science, what 2,000 years ago, the church already understood by faith: that the worlds were framed by the word of God in such a way that the things which are seen are made of things which the naked eye cannot see (Hebrews 11:3).

Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.

There was evening and there was morning, a third day. (Genesis 1: 11-13)

On the 3^rd day, God showed the author of Genesis how life sprouted from primordial soil and sea beds. The microscopic seeds of life God had planted blossomed into visible fruit.

It took a while, but it was worth it.