Shadowland: Beginnings: Week 5

Vowels on the final consonant

The Fourth and Fifth Day: Times and Seasons, Fish and Fowl

Figurative Meanings

• 1:14,15 "for times and seasons ... and to give light upon the earth" Psalm 19

  Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven. Acts 1:11

  "Seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth." Col. 3:1-2

  "Look at the heavens and see; And behold the clouds-- they are higher than you." Job 35:5

• 1:22 "And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes." John 21:6 John 6 Numbers 11:31 Revelation 8:9

Literal Interpretations

• 1:14 Augustine notes, "And if time was even before the heavenly bodies, not indeed marked by hours, days, months, and years,—for these measures of time’s periods which are commonly and properly called times, did manifestly begin with the motion of the heavenly bodies, and so God said, when He appointed them, “Let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years..."
• 1:16 "And God made" from preexisting materials - as opposed to "created". "The greater light to rule the day" - This is the most direct support for the Framework Theory. These are the rulers of the realms of light and darkness.
• 1:17 "set them in the firmament". This seems to fit perfectly with Aristotle's cosmology of stars embedded in the celestial sphere.

  Big Bang: oxygenation turns atmosphere transparent, so that the Sun, moon, and stars appear. Note that there is a perfectly good Hebrew word for "appear" from day 3 that is not used here.

• 1:20 "And God said, Let there be..." Framework: rulers of the sea and sky.

  In the Framework theory, "Let there be" is not a command, but a design statement. Anthropomorphically, imagine God sitting at a desk drawing up plans for the new creation and muttering to Himself "let there be this" and "let's do that". Augustine reasoned that God was talking to the angels created and/or enlightened on day 1. A "seminar for the angels". Think of it as the "Making of" included with a movie DVD. The days in the "making of" are literal days, but unrelated to the days in the story told by the movie.

• 1:21 "And God created" - Contrast with Day 3 where God commanded and the earth brought forth. This seems to support the Young Earth position with all the kinds created at once. Big Bang commentators generally have God creating initial organisms, which then diversify via evolution. (Evolution cannot produce the first living things by definition - mutation depends on self-reproduction.) Michael Behe is a proponent of this model, pointing to "irreducible complexity" as a barrier to creating wholly new genetic code.
• 1:22 "And there shall be no more death." Rev 21:4

  Was there death before the fall? The Young Earth theory suggests that there was no death, and sees the deaths of billions of organisms implied by evolution as a horrific underpinning of the Garden of Eden. The world before the fall was radically different from the world after the flood that we now inhabit, so this is a valid argument. A counter argument is that death of cells is how our hair grows, our skin renews, our blood recycles, etc. Was no renewal needed before the fall? Where do you draw the line between "good" death and "bad"? What is death?

  However, it is often suggested that there was "no entropy" before the fall. This is a mathematical claim, and is almost certainly false, and shows a lack of understanding of entropy. If they mean literally, "no entropy", there would be no information - the ultimate nothing, recalling Genesis 1:2. If they mean "no increasing entropy", there would be no new history (no change) - like a dead statue.

  What they might be trying to say is that there was a continuous and infinite supply of order from God, so that the creation was immortal (not unlike the outdated "continuous creation" secular cosmology) until it died in the fall, by being cut off from the source of life.