The first three days of separation creation is primarily speaking about what happened in moral and spiritual reality, and is describing events in the physical side of things only secondarily. What is happening in the physical universe is merely a shadow or a reflection of what is happening in that deeper part of nature which in our present primitive state of understanding we refer to as “the supernatural realm.”
A shadow, reflection, or hologram of a solid barrier is not solid. We exist in the hologram/shadow, but the reality which cast the shadow is real even if its reality is not to be found in the shadow.
To put it simply, God on day two in the physical universe was establishing what we know today as the “water cycle.” Prior to this point we have much water, no cycle. The early earth was a hotter and wetter place than the one we know today. Scientists have told us that Mars had significant amounts of water in its distant past, and have speculated the same for Venus. Today both are dry. If they had abundant water in the past, it evaporated and was lost into space. On earth, the process of water escaping into space was arrested. A functioning and stable water cycle was established. This produced conditions suitable for habitation.
I am going through a lot of science fast here, but imagine early earth just as you might see it portrayed on a nature channel broadcast. It’s the standard picture of a planet shrouded in clouds, with steam rising everywhere from a hot surface. In many spots, lava flows as vents spew out molten rock and ever more water vapor. Crust sinks and rises with no build-up, and therefore no mountain ranges. If there was any rain, the heat emanating from the surface would evaporate it before it ever got near the ground. Isn’t that about right?
Now consider last portion of Genesis 2:4-6, which is the towledah for the chapter one material:
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,
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.
But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
. To paraphrase the above: This is the story of the Heavens and the Earth, when God made them what they are today. There were no plants or herbs in the field before this. There were none at the start of this account because God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to cultivate them. But mist used to rise up from the earth and cover the whole face of it with water.
It is describing what the earth was like before God intervened. Water went up, but did not much come down. Earth was very wet, but it was drying out just as scientists think Mars and Venus dried out. If the process had not been arrested, it stands to reason that in time our world would have been as barren as those places are now. But what should impress the reader is how very similar this description is to what one might see watching a nature channel program on the same subject of conditions on the early earth.
Now one might quibble at the idea of the division of the waters above and those below on the grounds that clouds today are such a very small proportion of the earth’s water compared to her oceans. That is true today, but I don’t think it reasonable to suppose this was the case at the time described in Genesis 1:6-8. I should think that cloud cover would be much greater. Not only would the early earth still have a much thicker atmosphere, but until plants became common that atmosphere would contain more CO2 than now.
This abundance would have caused earth to retain much more heat, and thus evaporate much more water into the air. In addition, the oceans would be much shallower because the crust of the earth would be “spread out” and not piled up into continents. The water would be distributed more evenly across this ground, and at this point a lot more of it was still trapped in the crust and had not yet been released via volcanism.
Perhaps you have seen how much faster the water in a puddle evaporates when the water in it is spread out? Between the increased greenhouse gases and all of the factors listed above one could expect evaporation of water to have occurred at a very much higher rate. So much higher that an observer at the time could very well speak of the establishment of a functioning water cycle as “the separation of the waters that were below from those that were above.”
Let us move onto the aspect of God’s work in the unseen (by us) world on the second day. I have said that His work in the realm beyond is the type and what is happening in what we call the natural world is a mere shadow of that. On the first day, He determined what the relationship between good and evil would be within this universe. It would be a mixture of Day and Night. Having made and executed that decision, God next dealt with the issue of how justice and judgement would be applied in the two realms. Very much related to this is what degree of connectedness there would be between them.
Water is a fundamental. It is one of the four classical elements. It flows. It connects. It sustains. And in scripture, it judges. It acts either to give life and make clean or to destroy and bring death. Water represents judgement. If you have one realm, heaven, where there is no darkness at all, and another realm, the natural universe, where there is both darkness and light, how does one mete out judgement in each realm?
The best of men might be worse than the worst of unfallen angels. Indeed like the Pharisees, in terms of outward conduct even a fallen spirit might be better able to temporarily restrain their outward actions compared to humans burdened by the weakness of our flesh. Yet it would not be just to judge us, in this life at least, by the standards of those who live in the light of heaven. Nor would it be fair to judge them by our standards. They ought to do better than the best of us.
For minds restricted by modernist thinking, the issue of what degree of connection there will be in the natural world and the supernatural one is never considered because they have mental chains which restrict their thinking. They can only think in terms of “what is seen is all that there is.” Broader minds consider the possibility that there could be more out there than what they can perceive with their own senses.
Indeed 2nd Corinthians 4:18 instructs us to focus on what is unseen rather than that which is seen, because what is seen is temporal, but the unseen is eternal. Hebrews 11:3 expresses the thought that what is seen is made from that which is invisible to us. The Hebrew belief was that many things on this earth were simply flawed copies of that which existed perfectly in the heavenly realm.
If there is a spiritual realm, a world normally unseen to those of us trapped in time, one of the first questions a Creator might consider is “what shall be the degree of connection or flow between the two realms?” What happened with earth’s water parallels what the Creator did regarding this question of connectedness. And by “connectedness” I don’t just mean physical access, but by being connected in terms of standards for justice and judgment. The two factors are strongly correlated. Heaven and the Lake of Fire for example, are most separate.
As with the question of the connectedness of darkness and light on the first day, the question of connectedness of the heavenly realm and the earthly one had several possible answers. God could have decided that there would be no access between the two ever, or that there would be access always. The Creator could have decided that there would be no space between them and therefore no separation or barrier to access. That would have been unfortunate for us though, because if there is no barrier to access then there is no room for a separate standard for justice or judgement.
This decision of access or connectedness has to be made for every realm which is created. For example, in Luke 16:26, the story of Lazarus and the rich man, we see very similar language to that in Genesis chapter one in the sense of a space being placed between two things to keep them separate. In that passage the separation is between the abode of the unrighteous dead and that of the righteous dead. In the abode of the unrighteous dead, there is no water. I have a lot I could say about that regarding the nature of Hell, but let me move on. Here is the verse:
“And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.”
The wording about the “great gulf” cannot help but remind one of bayin, the space put between the darkness and the light on the first day, and the space placed between the upper and the lower waters described on the second day. On the second day God was establishing what sort of access/standard for judgement that there would be between heaven and earth.
In regard to those two realms in Luke 16:26, God made a separation, and it was an impassable one. What He decided in the case of heaven and earth was that there would be a separation, but not an unpassable one. Not an impermeable one. Moving between them would be easy for those above but difficult for those from below.
This separation in geography and space was a secondary effect of what was really happening here- a separation in standards for judgement. In scripture, water is connected to judgement. This is shown in the flood of Noah’s day, where Adam’s seed was judged. It is true in the crossing of the Red Sea, whereby Pharaoh’s army was judged. The prophet Jonah was cast into the sea to calm the waters troubled by his disobedience. If you are found innocent, the water represents a cleansing judgement. This is true for each of us, where the water of baptism represents God’s judgements purifying our souls in repentance. For those churches which practice full immersion the entry of the body under the water represents death and burial.
The emergence from the water in baptism represents new life. It is identifying with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Either way, whether water is washing away what is dirty, or representing the death of those who were disobedient, water represents judgement whether for good or ill. Much like water in the physical world, His judgements are wonderful if you are His, and terrible if they are against you.
That the waters above were separated from the ones below is a description of how God’s standards for judgement were going to be, for a time, different on earth than in the heavens. He does not tolerate up there what He allows down here. For a time, until the end of the age, He has established a lower standard for judgement than that which prevails above.
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