Day Two
Gen. 1:6-8:
Firmament: Here, God created the atmosphere, and stretched it out so life could be sustained. That’s why the word literally means “expanse.” This is the unending beauty, the fabulousness with which the sky stretches up into infinity.
Infinity forever like His grace, like His mercy.
For the same sky that we view, clothed in blue, is illuminated all around thanks to a great force at work in the center of our solar system. It stretches beyond the clouds, beyond the imaginable. Atoms and electrons spread to unimagined thinness and heights, yet are held together by that invisible force called gravity that which we rely on by faith, unthinking, to hold us down, to keep us from flying into space. God holds it together, just as He wants to be in the center of our lives, guiding us.
What we more technically call the atmosphere starts not at some point where we see blue, but as the very tips of our feet. Indeed, what little boy or girl has not gleefully sat on Daddy's shoulders and felt so excited at being "way up there." They know the truth the “sky,” that firmament God created, starts at the ground. When they sit on Daddy's shoulders, to them they are in the clouds.
It could only be because of gravity that this atmosphere this "sky" exists. And it can only be through faith that we can exist, perched on our Heavenly Father's shoulders. Even as infants we are in it. Maybe not very far up, but that's okay, because it's the very nature of God. He stretched the sky down to the ground, just as He reached down to us in our sinful state. To allow for us to fellowship with Him through prayer and His Word if we only have faith in Christ, just as we have faith in that invisible thing called gravity to hold that sky down to the ground, and keep these thin molecules from spiraling upward out of our reach, thus taking all the breath, all the life, out of us.
The Bible says He divided the waters from the waters. The many clouds above us contain immense amounts of rain. God organized the clouds in the way He did to provide rain when he saw fit.
There is a further explanation of how waters may have been divided, which has been deduced in the last century. The ultraviolet rays from the sun are strong enough that – though we receive only a fraction of them – they cause decay. While the sun gives us vitamin D, too much exposure to it causes manifold problems. Mankind could never live for centuries under present conditions.
However, if there was a canopy of water less than a foot thick surrounding the earth, the earth and all on it would be shielded from harmful rays. It would be warmer than it is today, yet it would also be cool enough to sustain life easily. In other words, it would be like a giant rainforest. This is exactly what scientists say the world was like, but they fail to understand that it was like that mere thousands of years ago, not millions. This is why people were able to live to the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs. The Great Flood of Noah, then, was caused not only by the “waters of the deep” opening up, but also by the pouring down of water from that canopy onto the earth. And, as you can tell from reading, life spans got much shorter, very quickly, after the Flood.
It is possible, of course, that by Heaven, the Spirit-inspired author meant the solar system, or even the physical universe. Whether it was created on day One or here, though, one thing is certain. God saw that it was good. There was a splendor, a majesty, that can’t be described.
The closest I can imagine, perhaps, may be the scenes streaming back at me on TV from the Mars rover years ago.
To be able to gaze at real, live footage, from a totally different world, in which the sky, the ground, everything was so distinct from my own Earth, gave me goose bumps. I wept tears of joy at the beauty of it, and at the fact that the Lord was showing to us just one little piece of His amazing Creation. Somehow, it was far more than still pictures would have been. Even if there was no physical life, it was so unique, so fabulous, that words escape me, even now, as I ponder the immense distance, and the fact God is so powerful as to have done all that, and yet so loving as to concern Himself with each of us.
