Being the new year and all, I decided to make a better effort at reading the Holy scriptures. My task is being made a bit more easy as I have two resources to help. There’s a devotional that I suspect many of the church members or teachers at school use, seeing as how I bought it from the pastor who runs the office at the school. The second resource is a guide to reading the Bible through in a year that Ben made copies of for folks at church. What I like about it is that as long as we’re all using it, we’re all reading the same stuff every day and maybe we’ll even have more conversations centered around the portion of God’s word we read that day. It’s divided into two sections with two chapters per section. One section is to read as a family, and the second is to read personally. If you’d like to know where to get it, I can try to find out.
Hopefully this will also spark lively discussion on this here blog. I just read the first two chapters of Genesis and picked out a couple new things that catch my attention in this day of evolution and intelligent design and maybe God used evolution and all that stuff. Here’s what I found. I don’t claim to know everything, and I will even pose some questions to which I look most forward to reading responses to.
My first question is “How was there evening and morning without sun, moon, or stars?” In chapter one, you can read that God created a light and separated it from the darkness (Day 1), and then THREE DAYS LATER created the sun, moon, and stars. Don’t evening and morning imply sun and moon? This challenges my belief that the days were 24 hour days. It doesn’t mean they weren’t, but it looks at our common knowledge of days depending on the sun and laughs in its face. Not to mention the plants were created the day BEFORE the sun. Interesting, eh?
The evolutionary topic I discovered in chapter one is regarding how they were made. I’ve heard, as I’m sure you have, questions about whether or not God used evolution or some type of it to create the animals. Intraspecies evolution aside (it’s clear that animals have adaptations, I don’t argue that), the order in which animals were created intrigued me for a few seconds. First it was fish (and birds), and THEN it was animals. That order lends itself to an evolutionary progression. But then I read further and discovered that the Bible clearly says every animal was created “after his own kind”. It seems to me that even though the order might afford evolution, God actually did create fish separately from amoebas separately from alligators separately from cows, apes, humans, etc. The end of chapter one also suggests that everything was created vegetarian! Man…I love my steak (and eat a lot of it here).
Chapter 2 has some fun answers to questions. Were Adam and Eve the *only* people God created? I don’t know. I did notice something that I had never noticed though. Chapter 1 says that land animals and people were created on day 6. Chapter 2 tells us when. It looks like God created Adam first among all animals period. So it was plants, fish, birds, and Adam. Then God wanted a companion for Adam, so he created all kinds of land animals and had Adam give them names. Finally, he created Eve to be a real companion. I had never noticed before that animals came *after* man! One more thing that piqued my interest was that the land might have been plantless for some time. Just the way its written, to me, suggests some significant length of time before God caused the mist to water the ground that he had separated in order to sustain flora.
I really look forward to see what you have to say. I also anticipate many posts like this as I dive into God’s word daily. My prayer is to find stuff I hadn’t noticed before as well as gain a better knowledge of the history and purposes of God’s people, and later His desire for our lives. I hope I can even bless you with His word as I discover it myself anew.
-j
I'm Jason, and I like to write.