Genesis 1, Notes

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Comments for verse 1
  1 ¶ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. When did God's work of forming this world begin?
   Some see a separation between the action of verse 1 and that of verse 2 and onward. They feel that the formless earth was here before creation week. We may see support for this idea in a statement of Jesus who spoke of a time "before the world was jn1705. In any case, He created everything simply by His word and from nothing.
    I understand that the Hebrew form of the phrase, "heaven and earth" implies an all-inclusive unit. This would mean that "heaven" means more than the sky. Heaven and earth are the universe. From this we may understand that, although verses 1 and 2 could have been separated by time, they are part of the same unified action. In verse 1, He created the materials. From verse 2 and on, we see His creative work of developing or augmenting them. In the beginning the earth was "without form and void." In six days he gave it form and filled it.
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Comments for verse 5
  5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Could a day in this chapter be thousands or  millions of years?
    Many people today, even theologians, perhaps in an effort to be scholarly and accept the popular theories of origins, consider the first eleven chapters of Genesis as ancient mythology or traditions. In an effort to harmonize evolution and biblical religion, they say that a "day" in Genesis 1 was a long period of time – millions of years. This effort for harmony is called "theistic evolution." Any such attempt to assume the Genesis "day" as not literal, however, pulls a fundamental pin out of the credibility of the Bible causing the whole structure to crash. Obviously Satan takes fiendish pleasure in this. Consider the following reasons to believe the Bible as it reads:
As noted with v5 above, the fourth commandment of the ten God gave at Sinai refers to creation week assuming literal days ex2008.
If the Genesis 1 day were a million years, the plants created on day three would all die during the 500,000 years of darkness before the next daytime. The idea doesn't fit well into evolution either.
Over the years, evolutionists have lengthened their opinion of the time since life began in order to allow for evolutionary changes so a thousand years or a million are still too short. And now it may clearly be shown that some of the molecular life form structures could not have evolved since their component parts do not exist independently.
Evolution assumes a beginning, with lightning causing mutations or combining of elements to get the first simple life form going, but there is simply no explanation of where the sea and the lightning came from. Only God could create from nothing he1103. We cannot prove that but have evidence of His working in our naturally evil hearts. We may trust His word, too.
Peter wrote of scoffers who feel that the world hasn't changed and are "willingly ignorant" of the flood of Genesis 2pe0303ff. He wrote after the time of Christ, so if we doubt him, we doubt everything! In fact his warning is about this very thing. In verse 8 of the same chapter, Peter said that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years. This doesn't help because he also says that a thousand years is as a day. It's not a mathematical formula.
l believe that the God who sent Jesus and the Jesus who, with the Holy Spirit draws us to the divine way of peace and love, are also well able to preserve the truth of the Scriptures.

What is a "day"? Meaning of the Hebrew yom. (The word should be written with an accent mark: yôm. This commentary generally omits the accents since many accented letters for Hebrew transliterations are not in the common character set.)
The word, yom, may mean a literal 24-hour day or a long period of time or a future time. However, without qualifying terms or forms as in Genesis 1, yom always means a literal day.
When yom is modified by an ordinal number as in 1:5 (see left column) it is literal with the exceptions of ho0602, zc1407, and am0404.
Lexicographers (Dictionary writers) always follow the literal-day translation.
The seven-day work-and-rest pattern is confirmed twice in Exodus. Manna was provided and gathered for six literal days but neither occurred on the seventh literal day. This sequence of work and rest for both God and the people was clearly modeled after the creation week. Then in the ten commandments, as already noted, the Sabbath was confirmed by the same six-plus-one literal day pattern ex2008.
    This leaves us with the conclusion that the earth was formed in six literal days followed by one literal day set apart for rest.

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Comments for verse 11
  And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. What is the meaning of "after his kind"?
    The Hebrew word for "kind" is min. Phrases like "after their kind" occur a number of times in Genesis, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and are often quoted when refuting the idea of evolution. This is appropriate particularly for macroevolution (major changes of life forms) but we must avoid leaning too heavily on it. First note two passages where the animals themselves are not bringing forth. In verse 24 that the "earth" is to bring forth and in verse 25, "God" made the animals "after their kind." Min designates a group or multiplicity of animals and implies boundaries between the groups. It is never associated with the command to reproduce. (Rahel Schafer, JATS 14:1, p.97.) 
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Creation week – Three-part Pattern
Pattern
Reference
Formed
Filled
Rest
Sanctified
Problem Gen. 1:2: And the earth was without form, and void [empty];
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Creation week* Gen. 1:3 to 2:3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: Continuing through the six days.... "God ... rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it."
Day & night,
water & sky,
and so on
Sun & moon, fish & birds,
and so on
When heaven, earth, and things in them were made, God rested.
Sabbath blessed and sanctified.
Confirmation Ex. 20:8, 11: Remember the sabbath day.... For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
The Lord made heaven and earth.
And all that is in them.
"But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work," Ex. 20:10.
The Lord blessed the Sabbath and made it holy.
* The days of creation week form a literary pattern which gives another view of the ideas above. See a table on the Gen. 2 page.
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