Author Archives: 7days

The very end of God’s week does not start until Genesis chapter 2.  It is a very simple day in which God does only one thing.

Genesis 2:1-3

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

On this day, God’s work is completed.  There will be no more striving with man.  There will be no great plan to work through.  God blesses this seventh “day”: this word he gave to the light on the first day of creation, and to whom he gave authority over to the greater light on Day 4 which we have identified as the Holy Spirit.  And God sanctifies the day.  The word sanctify means to set apart as holy.  This also means that according to all the scriptures that follow Genesis 1, God will deal with man according to the word He gave Adam.

When God told Adam he would surely die, he immediately sacrificed an animal to provide a temporary atonement for Adam because even though God had given the command, and the outcome was irrevocable, God still desired to provide Adam and his descendants with life without end. Our guilt is not so much the things we do(as these are merely the symptoms of sin in our lives), but the guilt of our ancestor Adam and the decision he made to disobey God.  His singular act was so great, that it condemned himself and his offspring, so that all are fallen short of the glory of God.

But then the Greater Light came and ruled over the Day, likewise Jesus came and with his coming dawned a new era.  If you divide the week in half, you fall somewhere on Day 4 and it is the latter half of Day 4 when the greater light, Jesus Christ, finally appears.  As we have seen, the Jewish calendar begins with evening on the prior day and continues on through to early evening on the following day.  What this means is that if we were to treat God’s seven days as a week, then the first half of the week is ruled by the Night, while the second half of the week is ruled by the Day.

Jesus is the light of the world and he came to become a second Adam.  By this the scriptures mean that Jesus’ act on the cross, a tree, was so great, just as Adam’s act with the Tree of the Garden was so great, that all who believe in him will be saved, just as all of us who were begotten by Adam were condemned.  Adam ate the fruit of the forbidden tree and died. If we eat the fruit from the tree of life, that is Jesus Christ’s death upon the cross, then we live forever.

The reason this is important is what happens on the 7th day of God’s week of creation.  When he rests, he will quarrel with man no more.  This means something has happened to those who remain degenerate under Adam’s curse.  Like men who fail to reach out for a life preserver, the inevitable outcome is that they sink beneath the waves of the sea and are lost.

Go back and read through the first chapter of Genesis.  You will notice that in every day of the six days of creation God ended with “and there was evening and there was morning, the Nth day.”  But when we get to Day 7, there is no similar statement concluding the day.  The reason for this is plain: Day 7 has no ending, thus there can be no beginning of a new Day or era after Day 7.  It points to a time that will go on indefinitely; never transitioning to another era or part of God’s plan because all of God’s work with man will be finished and He will rest in the “very good work” of His beloved son Jesus Christ.

But the biggest joy of the Sabbath Era is that it will be characterized by rest.  Rest not just for God, but for all of us who are found in Jesus Christ.

For those not found in Jesus Christ, their story is no longer part of God’s story when Millennial Day 6 ends.  As much as men contend their desire to exist without God, no man has truly experienced the separation of God from his life.  We live in a world fashioned since the beginning of Genesis according to God’s plans and designs.  Every good thing we’ve found came first from him, including the life we live.  He has no desire to cut us off from his story, but unless we choose to take hold of the light he created for us in Jesus Christ, we remain under the curse of our ancestor Adam.

If you are not a believer, whatever sins you think you are guilty of cannot exceed the first sin committed by Adam.  Human beings tend to assign values to sin as we do with committed crime, but to God, one sin is equivalent to another.  Which means adultery is the same as murder, giving a false testimony is the equivalent to the genocide of a people, robbing a bank is the same as hating your neighbor. There is no distinction in God’s eyes; there is only sin that must be paid for.  Either the insurmountable cost of sin is paid for through our own life or it is paid for through the righteousness of Jesus’ sacrifice.

The choice is entirely up to us.

Closing Remarks

While driving along a winding mountain road, when you see a road sign warning of possible danger, do you proceed recklessly or do you slow down and drive cautiously, with greater apprehension and better awareness of your surroundings?

Genesis Chapter 1 is typically the first written word men read when opening the Bible.  Over the course of human history it has been studied, revered and ridiculed, but as has been shown, the scripture has more teeth to it than the skeptic can fully extract himself from.

But God’s first chapter is not a threat to the human race.  It is a road sign written for a people who would one day look upon his word as nothing more than myth, or irrelevant sacred texts.  When we fail to take God’s word seriously we fail to hear what God is really saying to us.  It is like seeing a warning sign on the side of the road and ignoring it.  But the authorities that place those sign do it for our benefit, that we might have life and have it abundantly, and not at the cost of what dangers naturally lay ahead for us.  Just because our government places a “Falling rocks ahead” sign does not mean government agents are in the mountains ahead waiting to push those rocks down upon us.  They simply have knowledge of the natural mechanisms in play and have placed these signs to prevent our harm.

Likewise, the terrible things some people have perpetuated about what God plans to do to the world have been misunderstood.  God defined the consequence for Adam’s disobedience prior to Adam ever having eaten from the tree.  Just as with all God’s word in the first six days of creation, God need do nothing more than speak for His will to manifest.  In essence, God can walk away from the whole of the human race and we will naturally die as a result of Adam’s sin without God ever lifting a finger against us.

What God is interested in, is not in man fixing the problem.  Through the Israelites He has demonstrated that, in and of ourselves, man cannot earn his righteousness.  Instead, God wants us to repent, which literally means to change one’s mind.  God wants you to change your mind, both about him and about your situation.  The first step in AA also happens to be one of repentance, it is changing one’s mind about oneself in that the individual admits he or she is powerless over alcohol.  God wants the exact same thing, our acknowledgement that we can do nothing about the sin nature we inherited from Adam, it is part of us, and not even our strong will is able to remove that which is so embedded within our nature.

His offer to save us is not an offer for us to work at saving ourselves, and while it cost His son everything, it costs us nothing to receive.  Religions made by man can be safely ignored, but a scripture that foretells events beyond the scope of the scripture are not so easily dismissed.  The first five millennial days have passed; the sixth is nearing its end.  No one knows the day, nor the hour of Christ’s return, but when he does return, it will happen instantaneously. There will be no opportunity to hop on the soul train at the last minute.  For when God finally reveals himself fully to modern mankind, where our faith can no longer be manifested within us to please Him, it will be too late to start giving the God you have just seen with your own eyes a second chance.

God does love you, if He did not, then there would be no road signs for you to even see. The end would come quickly, and quietly, without warning; with no opportunity to do anything different.  God is not interested in a heaven where we sit around strumming harps all day long; He is a being who created families, holidays, parties, celebration, love, laughter, and joy.  He plans to engage in that kind of rest going into this next Millennial age and His sort of rest includes all the wonder He intended for mankind to have.  He wants you to share in that seventh Sabbath day that never ends.

Won’t you change your mind and accept His invitation to the party?

Genesis 1:24-31

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Day six of creation is the reason behind all of God’s work on the preceding days.  It is the culmination of his efforts and as such the second most important day of the seven days of Creation.  Let’s take note of the things that happen on this day:

• God creates the cattle
• God creates the creeping things
• God creates the beasts of the earth
• God creates man in God’s own image
• God blesses them to bear fruit and to multiply
• God grants dominion to man over all living things on the Earth
• God gives man the directive to subdue the earth
• God defines what man can eat and what animals shall eat
• God decides it is not just good, but very good

Pulling the Message from the Bottle

At last we come to Day 6.  If God did inspire the scriptures in Genesis chapter 1, then we can expect he was aware of our perception during His very act of creation on Day 6.  I believe that a loving God concerned with mankind’s belief in His word would have considered our current predicament regarding science and taken steps to craft Genesis 1 in such a way that it would reveal the truth of His scriptures to our present time, apart from any authority science may lay claim to.

However, jumping straight into translating Day 6 would be a mistake.  Consider the previous days carefully and the story they tell.  On Day 1 we learn about the Dragon and his efforts to destroy mankind. Surely he was witness to the 6 days of creation.  Yet even though he saw what Moses would later write down, he clearly was not aware of the meanings hidden in the symbols.  For if he had, he would have planned accordingly upon realizing that God’s actions during the creation foretold the dragon’s failure to destroy man in the fall, or the dragon’s own plan to breed out the seed of man who would one day crush his head.

What I learn from this is that God understands those who are adversarial towards him, better than they understand God.  In our own way, we too are often adversarial in our thinking towards God.  Similarly to the Dragon, we assume we know what God’s plans and intentions are.  In so doing, we often miss the bigger picture.

The symbols we have read up to this point paint a very clear picture consistent with themes found throughout the Bible.  But if God sent a message to people of our present time, it behooves us to approach that message even more cautiously than on the previous days rather than to assume that, because we have the symbols of the prior days, we need simply plug them in and find out what that message is.  Unlike the other five days of Creation, the sixth day speaks regarding our generation as history has and is presently unfolding.

Take, for instance, the passage the “beasts of the earth.”  If we were to use our symbol for land we could interpret this to mean beasts of the nation of Israel.  But the same earth that the luminaries of Day 4 “give their light to” means more than for just the Jews.  While the symbols were relevant to Millennial Day 4 of 1000-1 BC, we cannot ignore the fact that the words of the prophets written in the scriptures now give their spiritual direction to both Jew and Gentile.  Thus earth as a symbol representing Israel during Millennial Day 4 must now include all the nations that have been illuminated by the scriptures because of the events described on Day 5.

Herein lies the vast intelligence of God: that a symbol, much like a three-dimensional object, can have different facets when viewed from different angles of history.

On the 6th day, God created the cattle, the creeping things and the beasts of the earth after their own kind. The term cattle is actually the word behemah.  In the next section, I will discuss both behemah and the tannin from Day 5 in greater detail as they are both tied together via their connections to the book of Job.  For now, I will simply note that it relates to an important event in the year 1525 regarding Christianity.

The next term is the creeping things, or remes, which means creeping things or moving things.  We’re going to jump ahead to where the Day describes this “creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”  This word creeps is the Hebrew word ramas which means to creep, moving lightly, or move about.  We saw God describing sea creatures and flying creatures by their movements on Day 5, so it seems that God is once again describing groups of organisms by their movements.  What is interesting about this term ramas is that it describes the movement of an organism that would have been unfamiliar to Moses at the time of writing Genesis, nor would he have had the informational foundation to understand what we know today.

Cracking the Code

This gets to the heart of God’s hidden message for the people of our time.  For example, if God wanted to talk about the internet, how could he do that?  He would not be able to use the term “internet” with Moses, because his language did not support the meaning of that term.  If an adult is going to communicate a desire to go out for ice cream through a child to his mother without raising the boy’s expectations, and the child has not learned to spell but has a keen capacity to mimic, then the parent may tell little Bobby to go ask mom if she wants to go out for “I C E C R E A M.”  God appears to have done similar through the descriptive movements of the things he made.  God did not seem content to say, “I made everything that crawls on the earth.”  He also emphasized how they “crawl”.  Whenever effort is made to emphasize something that ought to be obvious, careful consideration needs to be taken regarding the motivations that lie behind the repeated focus.

In the same manner, how would you describe cellular organisms to Moses?  He has no idea what a cell is, nor how they move.  If you start talking about cellular biology, Moses is going to start asking questions and those answers inevitably lead to more questions.  The best thing to do is to spell out the message: “C E L L” through the descriptions of cell movement.

It was not until the year 1665 that cellular organisms, which move about lightly, were even discovered.  But these same movements are described in Genesis 1.  But perhaps we can explain that away as simply a broad overgeneralization.

God also created the “beasts of the earth”.  This phrase was particularly troublesome.  I knew, for example, that beasts are often associated with governments and empires as the prophecies in Daniel 7 demonstrates.  But those beasts come out of the water, which we understand to be the gentile nations.  Revelations 13:11 does describe a beast coming out of the earth, but that beast is singular, and the beasts described in Genesis is plural so that does not help.

I began my investigation in history in an effort to identify what, if anything, distinguished the types of governments in 1000-2000 AD apart from those in the prior Millennial Days.  I found nothing of any meaningful relevancy.  I got to the point where there was simply no answer and I was ready to put this entire work aside over the issue of just one phrase I could not decipher.

So I told God my problem and explained that unless every detail was unlocked, I would not proceed, even if most of it was clearly relevant to actual Biblical and human history.  Thus I put the project aside for two days and, quite on their own, the details emerged, without any prompting from outside sources.

It turns out I was looking at the wrong end of history.  I had started with early 1000AD because the creation of these things happens early in Day 6.  But if you will notice there is an order to the creation of the cattle(behemah 1525AD), the creeping things(1665AD), and then the beasts of the earth.  It is certainly true that nothing relevant occurs at the beginning of our Millennial Day 6 to correspond to these beasts of the earth, but something significant did happen on our end of this millennium.

In 1795 Immanuel Kant proposed the concept of a peaceful community of nations in his essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.  In 1889, the Inter-Parliamentary Union was formed by William Randal Cremer and Frédéric Passy to encourage governments to solve international disputes by peaceful means.  Then on June 28th, 1919 the Treaty of Versaille was signed at the end of the first World War establishing the League of Nations.  Finally, at the end of the Second World War, on October 2, 1945, the United Nations replaced the League of Nations.

As has already been stated, beasts symbolically represent governments or empires in Daniel’s prophecy in chapter 7.  The difference between each of those beasts, and the beasts in Genesis, is that each empire stood on its own after rising out of the sea, which we know is the Gentiles.  But on November 5, 1949, Israel became a member of the United Nations, which renders a depiction of these beasts rising out of the sea in conflict with their actual symbols.  A more accurate symbol becomes the whole Earth itself since no symbol is required to depict a governmental body that has authority over the world.  What makes the phrase “beasts of the earth” interesting is the fact that Genesis specifies this empire in the plural sense, just as the United Nations is composed of many individual empires each an untamed wild beast in the eyes of God.

The importance of these three disparate facts, the behemah of 1525 in relation to the church(which I will discuss in a later section), the discovery of cellular organisms in 1665, and the United Nations in 1945 is that they are all important pieces of God’s plan outlined in Genesis.

Cellular organisms are the building blocks of life.  Recently, two proteins named sirtuin 1 and 2 were discovered that stifled the diseases associated with aging allowing mice specimen to live longer.  These same proteins influence metabolism, gene regulation and the repair of DNA.  While it has not happened yet, science is allowing us to come closer to countermanding God’s spoken word of, “If you eat from this tree, you shall surely die.”  If human beings achieve longer life spans, or even immortality, it puts the human race on a collision course with the very directive of God regarding the consequences of Adam’s sin.  In essence, we aim to become our own gods when we attempt to countermand God’s spoken word.

Finally, we have the United Nations, which is viewed by God as nothing more than a wild beast disobedient to His will.  It should come as no surprise that the United Nations is very much in opposition to God’s will as the organization routinely advances its own goals under the premise of man-centered interests, while simultaneously achieving inhumane agendas.  For example, while the United Nations claims to advocate for human rights, one of its permanent members is China, a gross offender of human rights.  While the United Nations claims to be opposed to sex-trafficking, its own officials have been tied to human trafficking in Bosnia in 2000.  Clearly, the agenda of this international organization is only superficially beneficial to human beings, while inwardly comfortable in the exploitation and harm of people.  Exploitative behavior like this is typified by the Dragon in the Garden when he misled and took advantage of mankind’s ignorance of evil in tempting man to eat the fruit.

Do You See What I See?

But Day 6 is not finished yet.  God continues by saying, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.”  Let’s take this apart.

This is God speaking, author of all Creation, aka the Creator.  A being of such incomprehensible knowledge and power who spoke “Light be” and light became.  A sentient creator that went out of his way to turn darkness into light, to turn nothing into something, the absence of human life into the presence of human life–this is a being worthy of praise and worship and He claims to have made mankind in his own image and likeness.

The significance of this act is lost until you understand God’s view on worshipping images.  Recall the mistake that King Ahab and Queen Jezebel made on Day 4 in defying God with the first and second commandment?  Let us re-examine that second commandment a little closer: Exodus 20:4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.”  The Hebrew word for idol in that verse is pesel, which means idol or image.  This same passage underscores the point by referring to “any likeness” just as Genesis 1 Day 6 says God created man in God’s image; in God’s likeness He created man.

What is the significance?  Well, the very next verse of Exodus explains we are not to “bow down,” which is the Hebrew word shachah, which means to bow down in a form of worship.  Well, whatever would that mean to us? Most people do not bow down to anything anymore, much less their God.  By examining the NASB translation, we find a clue to our answer in the definition, “weighs it down.”  What we give weight to, importance, esteemed value, reverence, highly prize, that we are willing to bend ourselves over for.  That is what shachah is.  And performing shachah to an image violates the second commandment of the ten that God gave to Moses.

Should we be surprised then, that God spoke about creating an image in the likeness of one worthy of worship on Day 6 when in Millennial Day 6 we find our culture revering the human image with greater “weight” than ever?  We idolize our celebrities on television and in the movies.  We have taken to proclivity the amassing of our own images so much that we have even created a name for this behavior: taking selfies.  We enshrine our images for all to see so that others may demonstrate their approval of our images through portals called Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.  No other culture has had the resources nor the means to render such weight to the reverence of our own image-an image created in the likeness of one truly worthy of the Like button.

But there is more to this than merely the idolization of our own images.  This is Day 6, the day of man.  If worship is going to be involved, then an appropriate ideology is required and only human-centric ideology will do for man-focused worship.  What this passage is really describing is the rise of a belief system that places the “weight” upon human beings rather than upon God.

The Last Great Ideology

In the late 15th century the term humanitatis first appeared and meant the development of human virtue, in all its forms, to its fullest extent.  This eventually gave rise to the philosophy of humanism: a variety of ethical theory and practice with an emphasis on reason, scientific inquiry and human fulfillment in the natural world that often rejects the importance of belief in God.  One of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, is credited with coining humanism as the “religion of humanity.”

The term “humanism” itself comes in a variety of forms.  There is literary humanism, renaissance humanism, western cultural humanism, philosophical humanism, and christian humanism.  But it is modern humanism, also known as natural humanism or scientific humanism which, according to its leading proponent, Corliss Lamont, “rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason, science, democracy, and human compassion,” that is most significant.  The 20th century gave rise to a number of offshoots to naturalistic humanism including the Age of Aquarius, the New Age Movement(1960-1970s), Secular Humanism, The Humanist Manifesto(1933, 1973) all of which replace man’s compliance to God’s standards with a compliance to man-made standards.

With humanism as its foundation we developed our understanding of modern science which has given rise to every medical and technological advancement.  It is from science that we learn that the age of natural terrestrial artifacts are older than the Bible would have us believe.  It is from science that we understand that the distance of stars is so great that the time it would take to reach our planet is greater than the time Genesis claims we have been in existence. It is through science that we have developed the idea of evolution.

Thus a direct line can be drawn from the challenges science has brought to bear against Genesis all the way back to the rise of humanism in the 20th century.

But if Genesis 1 is not relevant, as proven science would have us believe, how is it then that the Bible alludes to the very nature of humanism on Day 6 on the precise Millennial Day when humanism would rear itself up in full strength and replace God’s weight, with man’s weight?  These “coincidences” are becoming a pattern, and if I had a pattern like that on a lotto ticket, I would be a winner; so what are the odds?

Then God creates man and woman and proceeds to bless them with this charge: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”

What makes this blessing so interesting is that if we look at the population growth for 0-2000 AD we find a spike in growth starting around 1000AD.

The population estimates for the year 1 AD were between 170-400 Million, but then the population rate dropped to roughly 200-300 million people from 1 – 900 AD.  It wasn’t until 1000 AD that it got back up to at least 345 million.  From there it proceeded as follows:

As is evident, the charge to fill the Earth was fulfilled to the letter on Millennial Day 6.  But what made this population spike possible?  The Industrial Revolution brought a period of great advances in science and technology which resulted in a reduction in death rates contributed to by several causes: improvements to water and sanitation, increased food production, advancements in medical technology, and improvements in the standard of living.  All of these contributors can be traced back to science and its humanist roots, that God alluded to on Day 6.

God then goes on to charge man, whom he has just created in God’s own image and likeness, to “subdue” the earth “and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

The profound impact of this command is why Christians and Christianity still finds itself subject to the governing authorities rather than the other way around.  Recall the connection Jesus made for his disciples in calling them to be fishers of men. Thus we know that the fish represent the Gentile world that has heard the gospel but not yet benefited from it through the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.  The birds of the sky represent spirit-filled believers.  Both these groups find themselves under the authority of humanist-founded governing bodies and will remain so until the end of the 6th Millennial Day.

In addition to this, we also find the charge to subdue everything that moves on the earth, including cellular biology.  I believe medical advances will soon reach a state where the human lifespans are extended and when that happens, we will find ourselves in a situation similar to that prior to the great flood where God says in Genesis 6:3 “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”  When we threaten to contend with God forever, the final part of Day 6 will manifest.

God’s Message

Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”

Every good story has a climax, that point of decision that determines the end.  While God would undoubtedly point to the resurrection of his son 2000 years ago as the climax, human perception would see it quite differently.  Since Genesis is a message to mankind, that climax is revealed here in his final words at the end of his weeklong creation during the closing hours of day six.

At first, God’s directive sounds something like a lunch menu, until you realize that when God cursed the dragon to eat the dust all the days of his life–the same dust God shaped Adam from–that God was also handing a form of authority over Adam to the dragon.  The essence of this passage is a simple concept: your authority is implied over what you take as food for yourself.   Thus God’s directive is anything but a simple cafeteria lunch menu for the world.

Presently, we enjoy the benefits of taking living beings as food for ourselves.  But something happens at the end of Millennial Day 6 that changes that, not just for the human race, but for all the birds of the sky, all the beasts of the earth and everything that moves on the earth, with one exception.  If you pay careful note to Day 6, you notice a sort of repetition.  There is importance in every detail, but the detail of importance is not in what God says, but in what God does not say.

God speaks about the cattle 3 times, beasts 3 times, birds 3 times, but the fish of the sea only receives 2 mentions.  The number 3 in the Bible is a picture of completeness.  So on Day 6 the cattle, beasts and birds find completion by the end of Day 6, but the fish of the sea do not.

Now we know that the sea represents the Gentiles, and that the fish are a symbol of those people Jesus sent his disciples to catch from the sea.  The fact that the fish of the sea, representing the Gentiles, is only repeated twice, implies that they will not find their completion like the birds of the air, the beasts of the earth, or the cattle: or as their symbols describe, spirit-filled believers, the governments of this world, or the behemah, which I will explain in the next section.

But you do not have to take my word for it.  Perhaps you do not see any significance in the meanings of numbers in the Bible.  God apparently understood, so pay close attention now.  God did repeat himself three times for the beasts, three times for the birds, three times for the cattle, but only twice for the fish of the sea, which begs the question: where in Day 6 did the fish of the sea get left out?

The answer to that is at the end when God describes the dietary restrictions at the end of Day 6.  This seems a rather peculiar thing to leave out, unless you understand a simple basic truth, one that ought to concern every Gentile creature enjoying his god-free life in the dark waters of the deep: you need not feed what you no longer take responsibility for.

Recognize that when Peter caught the fish under Jesus’ command, he pulled them in with nets from out of the water.  When John the Baptist preceded Jesus, he put men under the water as a symbol of their being dead under the darkness of the deep, described in Genesis 1:2, or their sins, and then pulled them up out of the waters, much as God drew the land out of the seas on Day 3.  Since the fall of Adam, God has been engaged in a rescue operation to save as many human beings as are willing, because an hour approaches when God will end his efforts entirely.

When that moment comes, the division between the land and the sea will become permanent.  There will be no more baptisms, because nothing else will be drawn up out of the waters.  There will be no more redemption, because nothing else shall be transformed from out of the waters of the deep.  The only concern God had for the waters of the abyss was for the human life that had fallen into it through Adam’s sin; beyond that, God holds no intention of maintaining the living conditions of those things dwelling under the darkness of the deep forever.

What that means is this: when God excluded the fish of the sea on Day 6 from his list of what each creature shall eat, his exclusion served as notice to evict.  The simple truth of the matter is that God is not obligated to feed what God no longer takes responsibility for.  But the decision is not God’s regarding who or who will not make the choice to transition from sea to land.  Evolutionists like to speak about how our ancestors were fish that crawled out of the seas onto land.  If they find themselves standing before the throne of God, what will their excuse be when their own science called to them to leave behind the spiritual darkness over the surface of the deep to stand on the dry ground of his promised redemption?

Many people expect to make a decision about God when he finally makes an appearance.  How exactly does one go about ignoring a 3,400 year old encoded message that alludes to our era through the supporting Biblical meaning and human history as it has unfolded?  But by the time God has established who can eat what, those creatures still living under the darkness of the deep outside God’s purview won’t get the chance to change their minds and evolve at the last minute.  For God closes his creation account by assessing his work and determining that all he made was very good, just before Day 6 comes to an end.

Genesis 1:20-23

Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

As with the prior days, we will start with our list:

• God commands the waters to abound with living creatures
• God commands that birds should fly above the earth in the heavens
• God creates the great sea monster
• God blesses them to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In the Water

The story of Day 5 is one of the creation of fish, birds and sea monsters, or at least that is how it appears at first glance.  Much like in Day 4, the scriptures never actually provide specific names.  Instead, care is taken to describe the behavior of the living creatures.  We may believe that God created fish on the 5th day, but in actuality he created sherets, which is Hebrew for swarming creatures.  Likewise, though the english translations say birds, the Hebrew word is oph which means flying creatures.  Finally, the word great sea creatures comes from the Hebrew word tannin, which means sea monster, serpent, or dragon.  So instead of fish we have swarming creatures, instead of birds we have flying creatures and instead of whales, we have dragons.

The only symbols we can start with are sea and heaven.  Now we know from Day 3 that the sea symbolizes the Gentile nations, or all of us who are non-Jews.  We may not fully understand what is meant by swarming creatures at this point, but one thing we can be sure of is that God is bringing life to the seas and blessing them.  Since Millennial Day 5 covers 1 to 1000 AD we need to look for something that corresponds to the Gentiles in God’s plan.

In fact, something significant happened during Jesus’ ministry which would foreshadow his good news going out to the Gentiles.  In Matthew 13:1-2 we read on “that day Jesus went out of the house and was sitting by the sea. And large crowds gathered to Him, so He got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd was standing on the beach.”

The reason this verse is so important is because Jesus left “the house” and was sitting “by the sea” when “large crowds gathered to Him.”  God is the creator of the universe, and a creator is a type of authorship.  Authors use symbols in their stories, the fabric of the universe are the pages God works with, making everything in it the symbols of his story.  So the sea does very much symbolize the Gentiles that the Gospel of Jesus Christ would one day reach.  The house he left represents the House of Israel that the Gospel departed from, and the large crowds gathering is a picture of swarming, living souls.

But why did Jesus leave the House of Israel in the first place?

By connecting Matthew chapters 12-13 with Mark 3 we know that something significant happened to Jesus on this day prior to him going out by the sea.  First, in Matthew 12:1-7, the religious leaders challenged Jesus’ righteous leadership because his followers were picking heads of grain during the Sabbath; an act of work that was considered unlawful on the Sabbath.  Then in Matthew 12:8-21 they challenged his grace and they “conspired against Him, as to how they might destroy him,” because he showed grace to a man by healing his withered hand on the Sabbath; another act they considered unlawful work on the Sabbath.  Finally, in Matthew 12:22-29 the religious leaders attributed Jesus’ authority as coming from, “Beelzebul the ruler of the demons.”

The Jewish religious leaders rejected Jesus three times by challenging his righteousness, his grace and his authority.  As a result, we read in the first two verses of Matthew 13 that on that same day, Jesus 1) went out of the house and 2) was sitting by the sea.

One Fish, Two Fish

Now we know that fish do swarm in the seas.  We also know that when Jesus called his disciples, he told them in Matthew 4:19, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  In Luke 5:4, when Jesus first calls Simon, who will be Peter, to be his disciple, he tells Simon to, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”  Then in verse 10 he tells Simon, after they have caught a boatload of fish, “from now on you will be catching men.”

Jesus took great care to correlate spreading the Gospel with catching fish; and we know that in order for Simon to catch so many fish that it required another boat to haul them in, these fish would have had to swarm into his nets.  We have all the same symbols, but this event is not what God is prophesying about in Genesis 1.  In fact, these stories in the New Testament are echoes repeating what God described in Genesis 1.

As a result of these New Testament stories, the fish has often been associated with Christians and Christianity.  There are many different reasons given as to why Christians adopted the fish.  Even today you can find the double-arc fish bumper sticker on cars across America as if the owner is saying I am one of the fish.  But the Bible makes no claim that Christians are the fish, fisherman, yes, but not fish.

Instead, the Bible appears to portray unbelievers as fish to be caught. We all know that a fish out of water eventually dies, so the act of catching fish in nets and pulling them out of the sea is an act that brings death upon fish.  A more appropriate symbol for spirit-filled believers is the one spoken about by Jesus on at least two occasions.

New Creation

Interestingly enough, Jesus visited his cousin John prior to beginning his ministry.  At the time, John the Baptist was performing baptisms, as his name implies. Jesus came to John, in Matthew 3:16, to be baptized and “after being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on him.”

Well isn’t that interesting.  The moment that Jesus is drawn out of the waters, much like a fish caught and drawn out of water: 1) the heavens opened and 2) the Spirit of God came in the form of a dove and landed upon him.  Suddenly we have the other symbols we were lacking. We have an open heaven, and flying creatures tied directly to the act of baptism.  Baptism involves placing men who were dead in their sins under the water, which symbolized their dead state, much like the waters of the deep in Genesis 1 on Day 1, and then bringing them up out of the water by those charged to be “fishers of men.”  Then to top it off, we have an open heaven and a flying creature connecting with the man who had just been brought up out of the waters like a caught fish.  It is also interesting, that before God brought life to the land in Genesis 1, He first drew the land out of the waters of the deep described on Day 1.  Only after that, did life spring up on the earth.

Here’s the thing, Jesus did not require baptism for himself, but was baptized to connect all these details of Genesis Day 5 together for us to fully understand.  However, we cannot understand the message until we hear what both the Bible and Jesus have to say about birds.

In Matthew 6:26, Jesus says, “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?”

Isaiah claims in 40:31 “but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

Jesus says in Matthew 10:20 “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”

In Psalms 55:6 the psalmist hopes, “oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.”

These pictures paint a life of freedom, peace and rest.  These birds do not worry; they are taken care of by their heavenly Father.  Unlike fish, that swarm in fear of the dangers lying in the waters of the deep, birds have wings with which to fly away and be at rest–not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.

Decoding Day 5

It was the Spirit of God that came to Jesus in the form of a dove. Likewise, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to the disciples in the upper room after Jesus’ resurrection.  What the picture of Jesus’ baptism says and what Day 5 is speaking of is this:

Then God said, “Let the gentile nations(waters) swarm(abound) with swarms(abundance) of living souls(creatures), and let spirit-filled believers(birds) fly above the people of the covenant law(earth) across the face of the open(firmament of the) heavens.” So God created the great dragon(sea creatures) and every living soul(living thing) that swarms(moves), with which the gentile nations(waters) swarmed(abounded), according to their kind, and every enabled(winged) spirit-filled believer(bird) according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the gentile nations of the world(waters in the seas), and let the spirit-filled believers(birds) multiply on the earth.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

Take careful note that this is the first time God has spoken a blessing over anything in his creation since he started his work.  That these symbols in Genesis 1 could speak of the transformation that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 5:17 “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come,” is no coincidence.  When the Bible interprets the Bible, the Gospel pops out of every passage, nothing is left to chance.  Since the beginning of Creation, God had a plan in place for the redemption of man.  What this should tell us is not that God arranged for man to fall, but that God knew man’s adversary and from the very beginning had a redemption plan in place to thwart Satan. That no matter what the Devil accomplished in the Garden, or thereafter, his efforts would only work together for good towards blessing man.  To go from being a fish that swarms with other scared and anxious fish over terrors that wait in the waters of the deep, pulled out by fisherman in an act that would otherwise kill natural fish, to then be transformed into a flying creature that can fly away and rest is a message of good news for us.  It is the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But do not take my word for it.  Let history be your judge.  Recall that part regarding those fish and birds being fruitful and multiplying?  It should come as no surprise, then, that by the year 300 AD Christianity had exploded from 1000 followers in Jerusalem to between 5-8 million followers and had become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. From there it went throughout the world to every nation and as of 2010 the number of Christians in the world today is estimated at around 2.2 billion.  So the question for the skeptic is, how did Moses know, or how did Jesus anticipate that when Moses wrote Genesis 1:22 where God told the living souls(Hebrew word nephesh) of the waters and the flying creatures of the heavens to “be fruitful and multiply” that the receivers of Jesus’ Gospel would, in fact, “bear fruit” and “multiply” and “fill” the nations throughout the Gentile world?

Without divine knowledge there is no way the man leading the Israelites out of Egypt could have foreseen the explosion of Christianity.  He had enough problems just with leading his people through the wilderness.  Nor was it possible for Jesus, as simply a man preoccupied with upsetting the religious status quo of his day, to take advantage of a thousand-four-hundred year old prophecy he just happened to fall within, nor have the foresight that his efforts would produce a great following after his death unless he truly was the beloved Son of God.

But even if you can conceive of some means by which Christianity could have concocted this arrangement over thousands of years, we are not done; for on Day 6 God shows us an image of ourselves through the crosshairs of Genesis 1 Day 6 almost 4000 years before our time.

Genesis 1:14-19

Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Again, there is a lot of detail listed here that is relevant to understanding the fourth Millennial Day.  So let’s make another list.

• Lights created in the expanse of the heavens(above the earth)
• These lights give light on the earth; they give signs and seasons
• The lights divide the day from the night, which is distinguished from the division in day 1 where light is divided from darkness.
• God makes two greater lights, one to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night
• Specific symbols: heavens, day, night, signs and seasons, stars, earth, darkness, light
• General symbols: lesser light to rule the night, greater light to rule the day

Not As It Seems

Unlike the previous days, Day 4 posed the greatest difficulty to unlock because it includes both specific symbols, and ambiguous symbols.  Specific symbols we can quickly identify and extract their inherent meaning.  For example, earth is once again referenced on Day 4; it is also the same Hebrew word erets used on Day 3 to identify the Israelite nation God delivered from the seas both literally and figuratively.  They were literally redeemed from the seas when God parted the Red Sea to allow them to cross on dry ground, and they were figuratively separated from the Gentiles through the covenant that God established with them alone.

Ambiguous symbols like the greater and lesser lights are a snare for those who make assumptions too quickly.  While the phrases “greater light to rule the day” and “lesser light to rule the night” imply the sun and the moon, Moses did not make use of the Hebrew words shemesh for sun and yareach for moon, when he quite could have.  For in writing Genesis 37:9 regarding Joseph’s dream, Moses uses both these words.  Given that these words were within Moses’ vocabulary when he wrote Genesis 1, we ought to be cautious about presuming what these two lights are too quickly.  If God truly is the divine author of Genesis 1, then we are dealing with a great intelligence, and assuming we know what He means, when He has been intentionally ambiguous regarding what we could rightly presume to be the sun and the moon, is how mistakes are made when reading the Bible.

Lost Into the Night

From the text we can discern some facts.  We know, for example, that the lights are all created in the firmament of the heavens and they give light to the earth.  Most appear in the night, and we know this because stars is plural rather than singular, and stars only appear when night is full.  Which leaves only the greater light during the day to shine alone.

We know that earth represents the Israelite nation.  Though the lights appear during the night and day, the emphasis is clearly on the night due to the number of lights available.  When searching for the identity of a needle in a haystack, it is always best to start with the haystack that has the most needles.  But there is another reason we should start with the night.

The Jewish calendar is designed in such a way that day begins on the evening before and extends overnight to the evening of the following day.  Which means that night always precedes the day.  This is illustrated in several ways in Genesis itself, if you go back and reread the ending to each day, you will notice that God identifies the days by saying “and it was evening and morning the [Nth] day.”  Furthermore, the logic behind this is founded in the fact that prior to God creating light, darkness pre-existed.  Thus, if we are going to identify these lights, it helps to start at the beginning.

Night is one of the words we already know from Day 1; night is the name given to the darkness and darkness represented the contrast with light just as evil contrasted with good in the forbidden tree.  Darkness is strongly symbolic of spiritual ignorance and evil; and night is when darkness is full upon the surface of the world.  Now, Day 4 makes a distinction regarding what part of the world with which we ought to be concerned, realizing that the surface of the world is made up of land and water and these two symbols mean different things as far as Genesis is concerned.  Since the lights being created are made to “give light to the earth” we are only concerned with the earth or land, not the waters or the seas.  So this light is exclusive to the nation of Israel.

But if the stars are giving light to the land, then it also stands to reason that the darkness of night is being given to the land as well.  So we are looking for something in 1000-1BC where the nation of Israel suffered under spiritual ignorance.  Since darkness is spiritual ignorance, all forms of light must represent their opposite.  In fact, the Bible gives us a great definition that describes exactly that in Daniel 12:3, “Those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”

This passage is remarkably similar to the description of the lights from Day 3 in the same generalized sense that God describes the lights that rule the day and night, but specifically calls out the stars.  Why didn’t God and Daniel identify the sun and moon, but instead make vague reference to them through their descriptions?  This description not only contrasts well with the darkness, but it does something else for us as well.  For the first time, it personifies the symbols of light.  Originally, in Day 1 we had very little to go on to make reference to actual persons, though we could see the traits of light and darkness exhibited in God, Adam and Eve, and the Dragon.  Now we can say with some certainty that some of these symbols actually represent persons.

Therefore, looking at the timeline for Israel between 1000-1BC we immediately find what we are looking for.  Israel did indeed go through a terrible time of spiritual ignorance as described by the symbols in Genesis 1, but to understand it, we actually have to rewind the tape a bit.

The Worst That Could Happen

After Moses brought the nation of Israel to the Promised Land, he imparted his authority to Joshua, who in turn passed it onto a series of Judges that ended with Samuel in 1100-1000 BC.  Samuel was also a priest for Israel, but something significant happened under Samuel that would forever change the course of Israel.

The Jews asked Samuel for something that created a divide between God and the nation of Israel; the consequence of which, God himself warned, He would not deliver them from.  The fulfillment of this request opened the door for spiritual darkness to cover the entire nation of Israel and even threatened God’s plan regarding the Jews. What was so serious that could have caused all of these things?  We find out in 1 Samuel 8:5, when Israel says to Samuel, “Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations.”

The significance of this request lays in the fact that up until this point Israel was led by the priests and the Judges.  So in asking for a King to rule over them, Israel was not only rejecting Samuel as their leader, but more importantly, they were rejecting God as their King.  So why was this a big deal?

Saul was their first king and he ended up going crazy in his murderous pursuit of David, the shepherd boy anointed to be his successor.  I strongly believe that Saul was an opportunity for Israel to realize their mistake and recant, but they did not. So after Saul, David became king.  Though he was better than Saul, he still committed adultery and murdered the woman’s husband to cover up his sin.  After David, his son, Solomon, took the throne and brought great prosperity to Israel, but under his rule the spiritual direction of Israel began to stray from God and the trouble began.

King Ahab entered the picture around 885 BC and his wife, Queen Jezebel, introduced Israel to the worship of another god named Baal.  The two also allowed for the building of Asherah poles in the high places.  Now unless you understand the covenant God struck with Israel, you cannot begin to appreciate what a colossal mistake this was for the nation of Israel.

In Exodus 20 we read the first of the Ten Commandments written on stone, “You shall have no other gods before Me.”  With the introduction of Baal worship, the Israelites unequivocally violated this commandment.  The very next commandment reads, “You shall not make for yourself an idol…You shall not worship them or serve them.”  By building those Asherah poles in the high places, the Israelites broke this one as well.  As much as skeptics complain about God instructing Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, which Abraham never had to follow through on, Jezebel introduced worship of a pagan god that actually did require the sacrifice of sons and daughters on a regular basis.

The reign of these kings marked a dark time for Israel.  This period happened over a series of cycles, or seasons as Genesis 1 Day 4 hints at, whereby, under the misguided leadership of their king, Israel turned away from God only to be punished. Then, under the spiritually directed leadership of their king, Israel turned back to God and was blessed.

Starlight, Star Bright

It is the source of the spiritual direction to which the kings turned where we finally find our stars.  It turns out that these stars were the prophets of the Old Testament of which there were four major ones: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.  These also included the twelve minor prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai Zechariah and Malachi.  When we examine the time periods in which these and other prophets in the Bible lived and ministered to Israel, we discover an interesting pattern: all but four lived in the 1000-1 BC window of Millennial Day 4.

http://biblehub.com/timeline/

Now I’ve included the likes of Abraham, Moses, Samuel and John the Baptist to illustrate an important point.  We are not simply looking for prophets in general, rather the many prophets who lived on Millennial Day 4.  We need many, because there are many stars in the night sky.  Additionally, these prophets had to be in the symbolic representation of night for Israel, which happened precisely on Millennial Day 4.  This means that even though Abraham was considered a prophet by God, he was also a friend of God and greatly blessed, so he did not live under this spiritual night.  Moses, who was also a great prophet who performed many signs and wonders, including delivering Israel from Egypt, had not yet brought the people of Israel out from among the Gentiles, nor did he enter the Promised Land with the rest of Israel.  So he did not meet the requirements of the symbols: being of the land under night.

Samuel lived close enough to it, but he was the priest under which the situation was seeded. It did not actually take root in the waywardness of Solomon and Ahab until long after Samuel was gone. So he could not have provided any light to the spiritual ignorance the nation suffered from since he was not there for it.

This leaves John the Baptist, who was born prior to 1BC but whose ministry took place in 28-29AD.  It is in situations like John the Baptist where we may need to recognize that we are dealing with a ten-hundred year span of time, the approximate start year of 4000 BC is based on careful calculations derived from the Bible’s genealogies by Archbishop James Ussher. While the accuracy has been verified by a number of different peers, some discrepancies may exist, so some minor flexibility on a couple of decades is not a very big deal, whereas stretching this to meet a hundred years, as in Samuel’s case, would be too big a stretch.

Even if that were an issue for the skeptic, one other point needs to be made regarding the type of paradigm God used to communicate this message: a series of seven consecutive days.  Which means that events on Day 1 would carry over to Day 2 and so forth.  We would not expect the land God created in Day 3 to disappear on Days 4, 5, 6, or 7 without explanation; likewise with the light created on Day 1.  So for John the Baptist to appear just on the edge or outside the window of Millennial Day 4 suggests less an error to the prophecy God placed in Genesis, than the carrying forward of things already established on a prior day.

Nevertheless, there is something to be said of John the Baptist and it comes from an angel of the Lord telling John’s parents, prior to his birth, in Luke 1:17 that John would, “go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah.”

Second Star to the Right and Straight on ‘Til Morning

If we look at our list of symbols, we can see that we have identified the stars, the light, the night, and the darkness, but the day, the lesser and the greater lights remain undefined.  Since we started with night, we ought to start with the lesser light that ruled the night.  The “spirit and power of Elijah” in Luke 1:17 makes reference to the Prophet Elijah who appeared at the beginning of this spiritual night that hung over Israel.  Like Moses, he performed many miracles.  Among them, he had a dramatic showdown with all the prophets of Baal, where he challenged them to call down fire from their god Baal to consume an offering, but despite all their efforts they could not.  Then Elijah had a trench dug around his alter and had 12 barrels of water poured upon it so that it was completely soaked.  When he called down fire it consumed not only the sacrifice, but also the stones of the altar and licked up even the water in the trench.  Elijah spoke a drought upon the land that lasted for three years and ended only after he prayed for it to cease.  He prophesied over a widow’s jar of oil that it would not run dry during the entire drought, and when her son died, Elijah was the prophet who raised him from the dead.  When King Ahab sent two separate groups of 51 soldiers each to seize Elijah, he called down fire that consumed all of them both times. Finally, when Elijah’s time was nearing the end, he divided the river Jordan and walked across the dry land before being taken up into heaven by a whirlwind.  Before he left, however, the Prophet Elisha received a double portion of the spirit under which Elijah operated.  Through this double portion, Elisha also did many signs and wonders, and the spirit he was under is the same spirit that the angel said was on John the Baptist: the spirit of Elijah.  Which helps us to understand why the symbol for the lesser light is ambiguous, because there is nothing in the heaven to adequately describe a spirit in terms that man can understand like a star we see, or the earth under our feet.

But if the spirit of Elijah was the lesser spirit that ruled the night, which it clearly did, then what of the greater light that God ordained should rule the day?  Well, since the spirit of Elijah came with a man, we ought to expect that this greater light, which is greater than the spirit of Elijah, might also come with a man.  In fact, John the Baptist himself said in Mark 1:7, “After me One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to stoop down and untie the thong of His sandals.” Thus we have confirmation that the spirit at work in John testified to his rank as the lesser light compared to the one who is coming.

John the Baptist goes on to further identify who this coming person is in John 1:29-30, “The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is He on behalf of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’ I did not recognize Him, but so that He might be manifested to Israel, I came baptizing in water.”  So John reconfirms that he is the lesser light, but goes on to identify Jesus as the one through whom the greater light will enter the world.  Since the spirit of Elijah accompanied Elijah into the world, it only stands to reason that a greater spirit accompanied Jesus into the world.  And in fact, God sent the Holy Spirit and imparted him to Jesus’ disciples at Pentecost after his death and resurrection.  But the Holy Spirit was not given until around 33 AD.  How do we explain this since that is taking us into the 5th Millennial Day?

Recall that according to the Jewish calendar, night precedes day.  Night is clearly demonstrated in Millennial Day 4 with all that happened with Israel’s errant kings.  But where is day?  Notice that God ordained these things on Day 4.  Before Jesus, there was John the Baptist, all the prophets and Elijah.  But Moses also performed wonders like Elijah, so while it has never been said, we can wonder if perhaps this same spirit of Elijah was at work through Moses. We do not know though, for the Bible does not say.  Yet it was Moses and Elijah who met with Jesus on the mountain during his transfiguration in Matthew 17.

We know that night and day are divided equally into a 24 hour period where each has dominion over the world for 12 hours each.  But at the boundaries, night and day have a sort of shared custody in the hours of dusk and dawn where night transitions to day.  If we were to take the course of seven days and divide it in half, we end up on Day 4.  It is at the end of Day 4 where the spirit of Elijah in John the Baptist meets the Holy Spirit in Jesus–the transition of night to day, and again in Matthew 17 during Jesus’ transfiguration when Moses and Elijah appear to Jesus and Jesus is glorified by a voice from heaven that states: “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!”  The lesser light and the greater light together and the passing of dominion over the earth, or Israel, from one authority to the next.

While there is much more than can possibly be said of Jesus, perhaps the most important for this study is what Jesus says about himself as it pertains to Genesis 1.  In John 8:12 we read, “Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.’”  Boom!

Recall that we learned from the scriptural definition for stars that the symbols represented persons.  Originally we believed that the light and darkness simply represented forces of good and evil, or spiritual truth and spiritual ignorance.  But here we finally discover the truth; the Light that appeared on Day 1 was none other than Jesus Christ himself!  He emphasizes that point by contrasting his description of himself with the darkness also described on Day 1.  John the Baptist confirms this truth as well, when he said in John 1:29-30, “for He existed before me.”  This is a rather absurd claim to make, considering that John was conceived by his parents before Jesus was conceived in Mary, which would make John the approximately 6 month older cousin, yet here John is claiming that Jesus existed before him!

So Day 4 is translated completely:  Then God said, “Let there be spirits(lights) in the firmament of the heavens to divide the time of spiritual revelation(day) from the time of spiritual ignorance(night); and let them be for prophesying, miracles(signs) and appointed times(seasons), and for days and years; and let them be for spirits(lights) in the firmament of the heavens to give spiritual direction(light) on the nation of Israel(earth)”; and it was so. Then God made two great spirits(lights): the Holy Spirit(greater light) to rule the time of spiritual revelation(day), and the spirit of Elijah(lesser light) to rule the time of spiritual ignorance(night). He made the prophets(stars) also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give spiritual direction(light) on the nation of Israel(earth), and to rule over the time of spiritual revelation(day) and over the time of spiritual ignorance(night), and to divide Jesus(the light) from the dragon(darkness). And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth (Millennial) day.”

Now, because the books of the prophets spans many hundreds of years, were written by a variety of different individuals, sometimes in very different parts of the world, we can no longer come to the conclusion that it was a conspiracy of a single author to make history fit a prescribed template.  The conspiracy would now have to include many men, over a span of many hundreds of years, from different regions of the Middle East many of whom never came into contact with one another.  Furthermore, it would have to include Jewish Christians involved with forming the New Testament church and writing its history, which is even less likely considering the view many Jews had of Gentiles.

But what Day 5 and 6 will reveal destroys any credibility to a conspiracy, because what is described on Day 5 could not have been known by Moses nor planned by the followers of Christ without divine assistance.

Genesis 1:9-13

Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the third day.

Day 3 is loaded with detail.  Let’s start by making a list of the key points:

• God brings forth the dry land by separating the waters under the heavens from the land into one place.
• God names the gathered waters the Seas
• God saw that separating the Earth from the Seas was good
• Life springs forth from the land(not the Sea).  There is a particular emphasis on seeds and fruit[Fruit is mentioned 3 times, seed and earth are each mentioned 4 times)

Separating the Land from the Sea

If the Millennial timeline is consistent, then we are looking for God’s handiwork between 2000 BC and 1000 BC.  As it turns out, Israel’s exodus from Egypt took place around 1440 BC.  Their exodus brought them to the banks of the Red Sea, where God famously parted the waters and allowed the Israelites to pass over on dry ground.  In Exodus 14:21 Moses writes, “Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord swept the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land, so the waters were divided.”  Compare that with Genesis 1:9 where God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.”  The similarities are striking, but they do not end there.

To really know what God did in this third Millennial era, we need to go back to around 2000 BC when Abraham was born.  It was with Abraham that God formed a covenant and separated him from the people of the world to be “a great nation”(Genesis 12:2).

The significance of this is lost unless we allow the Bible to interpret the Bible.  Examining the second point, where God called the waters the Seas, tells us what the Bible has to say concerning another meaning for Seas.

In Isaiah 57:20 we read: “But the wicked are like the tossing sea, for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up refuse and mud.”

And in Isaiah 60:5 “because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.”

Out from Grace and into the Law

According to the Bible, Seas is a symbol for the Gentiles, or those without the Law–those who are not under the covenant God established with Abraham.   As a result of this connection, the gathering the waters from the dry land on Day 3 correlates precisely to God separating Abraham and his descendents apart from the Gentiles both in the covenant and under the Law.  It is no coincidence then, that God placed his Law, which separates Jew from Gentile, upon stone, which is a symbol for dry land.  Strikingly, it was the Jews who walked on dry land in their escape from Egypt, while it was the gentile Egyptians who ended up under the water.

Then God called separating the dry land from the seas good, and God pours out his blessings on Abraham and his descendents.

Psalms 105:37 describes their departure from Egypt as so, “Then He brought them out with silver and gold, and among His tribes there was not one who stumbled.”  Of all the old and young, not one of them stumbled after having been in slavery and bondage for several hundred years? That certainly reflects God’s issuance to a barren Earth to bring forth life.

As God’s people, the Israelites(Earth) were separated from the Gentiles(Sea) under his favor.  By His favor they were led through the barren desert under a cloud by day and by a pillar of fire by night.  He brought them manna from heaven to eat on a daily basis; and when they grew tired of that, He gave them quail.  When they were thirsty, He gave them water and when they had only bitter water, He turned the waters sweet for them.  Between Egypt and Mt Sinai, the children of Israel lived under an open heaven of grace and abundance.

But God tested them as well.  He instructed that they should not gather more manna nor quail to eat than they needed for a day’s rations, except in preparing for the Sabbath when they were to rest as God had rested.  Unfortunately, the Israelites did not recognize their limitations as a result of these tests, so when the time came, God gave them directly over to the consequences of their pride.  Keep in mind, that up until Mt Sinai, God had shown remarkable patience to a people that grumbled and complained under his leadership and direction day and night.  He had performed all the wonders that delivered them from out of Egypt, led them across the Red Sea, gave them provision in the wilderness and provided comfort on their journey, yet still they lacked faith that his grace was sufficient for all they could need.

Thus, at the foot of Mt Sinai, before God gave Israel the Ten Commandments, He gave them this word in Exodus 19:5, “if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples.”

Stop for a moment and consider what your answer would have been.  If you had just taken three tests and failed each one and were handed a final exam by your teacher and asked: “Can you pass this test on your own?” would you really give the same answer you gave before by saying, “All that you test me on: I can do it!” before you have even seen what is on the exam?

There’s a particular reason why God tested them in this way.  He was attempting to show them an important lesson about themselves.  He gave them several opportunities to discover the truth on their own: that because of the sin nature they had inherited from their ancestor Adam, they could not earn their righteousness before God.  Recall that when God created the world man did not appear until the 6th day and only after God’s work was completed.  Thus God is not interested in what man can do, but in what God can do.  But the Israelites were too proud.  So in Exodus 19, before God had even given them one of the commandments they were to keep, their answer to him was: “All that the Lord has spoken we will do!”

Before even knowing what God would require of them, they were already confident that they would keep his commandments!  Suppose God asked them to do something so absurd that they would have no way of doing it?  But God is gentle in showing his children their folly.  They thought they could handle the Law, but they really had no idea the sort of beast they were about to contend with.  So God gave it to them, every letter of the Law of the Ten Commandments, and since that day, the Jews have been breaking the Law, requiring regular atonement to be made in order to be found right before God under their covenant with him.  Had it ever occurred to any of them that they had it so much better from the time they were delivered out of Egypt all the way to the foot of Mount Sinai, I am sure some would have preferred to go back under his grace.

 Bearing Abundant Fruitfulness

Nevertheless, the Israelites were greatly blessed in taking the Promised Land God had established for them.  He gave them success in battle, health, strength, and prosperity.  Remember how the earth and seed were each mentioned four times?  Four in the Bible relates to the Earth, while three signifies perfection, unity or completion.  The earth was mentioned four times, the seed was mentioned four times, so the seed and the earth relate to Abraham and his descendants on Earth while the fruit, which was mentioned three times, relates to perfection, completion and unity.  From Genesis we find the clues for what would happen in the third Millennial Day occurring between 2000 BC – 1000 BC where Abraham and his seed were separated from the Gentiles and flourished like the dry ground of Earth which was blessed with the perfect fruit of God’s spirit working on their behalf under his covenant with them.

In fact in Exodus 3:8, the very description of the Promised Land correlates strongly to the land God blessed on Day 3 when God tells the Israelites that he will, “come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey,” where milk and honey are symbols of fruitfulness and abundance.  From the inspired scriptures that Moses wrote, there can be no question then as to the events of Day 3 in Genesis 1.

Now as we enter Days 4 through 6, things are really going to begin to shift.  You see, all the events discussed so far happened before or during Moses’ time.  Which means, for the skeptic, it is entirely possible that Moses could have intentionally written Genesis 1 to match the other stories related to creation: the flood, Abraham, the covenant, and the events he claimed were happening in his own life.  But Millennial Days 4, 5 and 6 all happen long after Moses wrote Genesis 1, thus there would be no way for him to know the things that would happen.  Which means that if the message the symbols point to match the events in those eras, the correlation cannot be tied to any form of fabrication on Moses’ part.

Genesis 1:6-7

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.

Like Day 1, Day 2 at first seems fairly simple in dealing with separating waters both above and below the firmament, which God called Heaven.  Since we are dealing with water, it bears mentioning that our first encounter with water occurred when we found it sandwiched between the Spirit of God and the darkness on the face of the deep.  We will learn more about water in Day 3 when God finally gives it the name Seas, but for now we must draw what meaning we can from the relationships between the symbols as the story presents them.

We know from the Creation Story that God brings the land out of the waters and that He creates man on the solid Earth.  Because God only calls good those things that He divides from or creates within the water, we can conclude water exists as a natural state of fallenness from which God must work in order to redeem anything worth calling good.

Since the second Millennial Day falls between 3000 – 2000 BC we know that because Adam sinned that man now dwells within this state of fallenness.  It just so happens that Approximately 770 years after Adam died, around the year 2304 BC, God brings the Great Flood upon the earth.  This deals directly with the division of water above and below the earth.  To accomplish the flood, God brings the waters back together and then, in Genesis 8:3, causes them to return.

But while the Great Flood does deal with the water, God is also describing something more profound that scripture only touches upon prior to the flood.

Recall that God warned the dragon, Satan, that one of man’s seed would one day bruise his head.  The dragon apparently took this threat so seriously that Cain was tempted to kill his brother Abel after Abel found favor in God’s eyes.  But other sons were born to Adam and Eve and to their children and to their grandchildren.  If Satan intended to thwart God’s will and prevent his own defeat, then his problem was quickly multiplying before him quite literally.

That is when the dragon, being more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made(Genesis 3:1), introduced the very first campaign to drive a species to extinction by breeding them out.  We read in Genesis 6 that the sons of God took women for themselves as wives.  These sons of God were divine beings that appeared in human form to breed with human females.  As strange as all this sounds, we must recognize that we are dealing with creatures that existed prior to the creation under the darkness on the face of the waters of the deep, so they could not have been human, as human life could not exist in that state.

Scripture chooses not to expound on these creatures, except in context to what was prior to the flood.  But we are told that their wives bore them sons, called the Nephilim, which our English translations say were “mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”  Actually, that word “old” is the Hebrew word olam, which means they lived a very long time.  Take careful note that nothing is mentioned regarding any female offspring.  If you are a heavenly being able to take on a form capable of mating with a human woman, and if your agenda is to breed out the seed of Adam, then the best way you can accomplish that task is to produce only male offspring, who live a very long time and that are themselves capable of sowing a seed other than Adam’s.  Eventually, the only seed you have left would be the descendants of the Nephilim and since they have no female offspring, the human race would be diluted by a seed other than the one given to Eve by Adam.  The consequence of this would spell victory over God’s spoken curse against the Dragon, for if there were no more descendants of Adam, then there could be no seed to bruise the dragon’s head.  But Satan’s double-edged sword does not stop there, when all of Adam’s seed is bred out, there would be no more women, and thus the human race and Nephilim would expire.  There would be no remnant of any of those created in the image of God.

Sun Tzu is famous for his quote, “Know your enemy.” It is evident that prior to the creation of the world God knew how the dragon would attempt to thwart God’s will.  Let’s see how we can know that.  We know that the waters from Day 1 existed between the Spirit of God and the darkness on the face of the deep.  We know that water represents the state of fallenness.  Therefore, in order for God to prevent Satan’s breeding program from succeeding, He would have to divide the waters that represented the fallen sons of God living under the darkness on the face of the deep and their seed, the Nephilim, from the waters which represented Adam’s seed.  One set of waters would be raised above the firmament which is heaven(signifying redemption), while the other set of waters would be kept below heaven(signifying separation).

In fact, when God preserved Noah and his family, He did exactly that.  The line of Adam was preserved through Noah and the seven other members that he took with him on the ark which floated over the surface of the waters of the flood, which just so happens to be where the Spirit of God moved on Day 1.  While the Nephilim and their diluted seed perished under the flood that just so happens to be the location we find the darkness on the face of the deep from Day 1.  But consider the flood itself that the Bible claims covered the surface of the Earth.  With Noah above and the descendants below, there was an expanse between them.  Interestingly, the word firmament in Genesis 1:6 is the Hebrew word raqia, which means extended surface or expanse; a word quite befitting the floodwaters covering the surface of the Earth.

Day 2 describes two fallen states: Adam’s seed and the seed of the sons of God, separated by God through the Great Flood such that the waters were divided from the waters.  Thus was the prophecy of Day 2 fulfilled through the actions of the sons of God, the spawning of the Nephilim and the Great Flood that God used to eradicate them.

Genesis 1:1-5

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.

Here are the points we should take note of from reading this passage:

• Darkness existed prior to creation
• God created the light
• God separated the light from the darkness
• God named the light Day and the darkness he named Night
• God saw that the light was good, but he says nothing regarding the darkness, which, though it does not imply the darkness is evil, certainly emphasizes that the darkness is “lacking good”

Darkest Darkness

While Day 1 may seem rather innocuous at first, the definitions of the underlying Hebrew words paint an entirely different picture.  The first word is darkness, or choshek which is the same word that appears later in Exodus 10:21-29 during one of the plagues on Egypt.  As a result of this darkness, “they did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days, but all the sons of Israel had light in their dwellings.”  This verse comes from a time when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.  But if the darkness were a natural darkness, then we would expect the Egyptians to have access to the same natural light sources as their slaves.  Therefore, if the Israelites were getting natural light from candles, torches, and fire how much more would their masters have access to these sources!  This scripture proves that the darkness, choshek was not a natural darkness at all for natural light sources could not dispel it, just as the light the Israelites had was not natural light at all, because the choshek could not overcome it.

This same darkness was on the face of the deep, which is tehom.  Tehom is the Hebrew word for the abyss, where fallen spiritual beings dwell.  So right away we have this supernatural darkness tied to the dwelling place of fallen spiritual beings.  By creating light on Day 1, God is describing classic good and evil through the terms of light and darkness, along with the conflicts that go hand and hand with them.

But it is not until God creates Adam that we get our first look at darkness in the world.  On Day 1 when God created light, He separated light from darkness, such that wherever light exists the darkness cannot.  Likewise, before creating Adam, there was an absence of human life, but the moment that God formed Adam, the absence of human life co-existed simultaneously with Adam.

We read in Genesis 2:18 God remarking that, “it is not good that man should be alone.”  Being alone is the absence of other human life, and for a brief moment, Adam co-existed with this reality until God created for him a helpmate through the woman, Eve.  The moment God did this, the absence of human life that God found, “not good” was dispersed.

How Light is Made

The next form of darkness is typically more formidable a problem for human-invented gods to overcome.  Man-made gods tend to snap their fingers granting free will upon their creations, but how can your will be truly free when the only options availed are those your creator has provided? The fundamental problem with the nature of an omnipotent being is that he always gets what he wills.  That makes creating a being capable of choosing against God’s will impossible.  God cannot will into His creations the capacity to choose against him, as it would introduce a paradox.  When we recognize that obedience is righteousness and disobedience is sin, then to formulate this paradox would require Adam to obediently disobey.  To obey God, Adam would to have to sin because he does not have a choice whether he wants to be righteous, thus making Adam’s “sin” his “righteousness.”

At least, that is the case if you are a false god that does not know what he is doing.  The God of the Bible demonstrates an awareness of this fundamental problem and introduces the vehicle through which he gifts free will to his creations.

First, God makes something good, say a fruit tree.  The tree is good, because God has made it, and God only makes the things God likes, thus this makes the tree good.  Now because God’s creations are good things, they are also desirable.  That gives his living creations the motivation to want them, but this is not the same overpowering want as a starving man, it is simply the inclination to share similar approval as that of his creator.

The final piece of the puzzle is through the spoken word given in the form of a command.  By telling Adam that he could not eat from the fruit tree, God was establishing a boundary for Adam. No similar prohibition was given to the other fruit-eating creatures, thus there existed no reason they could not eat from this tree themselves; scripture shows that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden to Adam alone.  In giving that command, Adam now had two directives: the first one to naturally imitate His creator’s desire for all the good things He made, and the second good one, to obey everything his creator told him.

In the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam thus had two good choices competing against one another; because God had created the natural inclination and the command given, these two drives were held in perfect balance.  The only thing that could tip that balance would be the puny, insignificant, inclination of man himself.  Put another way, “I want to eat the fruit, but I want to obey God.”

We can know with a high degree of certainty that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil possessed no special physical property, because God would not create in contradiction to himself.  For the tree to possess an attribute that could impart a knowledge of spiritual evil, would be evil itself, and that would place God in a self-contradictory state of desiring to create that which he does not desire to make.  The tree’s only purpose was to provide the means for man to choose to either obey God’s will or choose his own.

Take careful notice that God also never said, “If you eat from this tree, I shall surely kill you.”  Rather, God said, “If you eat from this tree, you shall surely die.”  What God was imparting to Adam was a profound spiritual truth regarding disobeying a supreme being: that if you disobey the one who created the world you live in, the light you see by, and the life you are living, you are essentially separating yourself from him and entering into the same spiritual environment that pre-existed creation: a lightless, empty void in which nothing lived and in such an environment, man would surely die.

Night and Day

It turns out that by building the world on top of the deep, the Garden of Eden got paid a visit by the ruling authority over the abyss described in verse 2: the serpent.  The term serpent is actually the Hebrew word nachash that means shining or brassy one. In Revelations 12:9 we learn that this shining one is, in fact, a dragon: Satan.  We know it is the devil described in that passage because the verse speaks about how he deceived the whole earth.  If a creature other than the dragon tempted Eve, then the dragon could not have deceived the whole Earth.  It also suddenly makes significant the curse God placed upon him in Genesis 3:14, for the dragon is cursed to crawl on his belly and eat dust for all the days of his life.

But more importantly is the curse regarding Satan eating dust.  We know that Adam was formed from the dust, thus it stands to reason that Satan would have dominion over Adam through his death, as from dust we came and to dust we return.  It certainly did not help matters for God to tell Satan in Genesis 3:15 that the woman’s seed would bruise his head.  What has every fairy tale taught us about telling the villain prophecies regarding their doom? They will hunt down every possible threat and kill it. Which is why in the very next chapter we read about Cain killing Abel after Abel found favor with God.  When Lucifer saw that Abel had favor, it stood to reason that Abel could be the seed meant to destroy him, or an ancestor of the seed meant to destroy him.

As we shall see in the next chapter, Satan did not give up in his attempts to thwart God’s word.  In fact, the campaign he waged against the human race to orchestrate an end to man’s seed is what ultimately led to the great flood.

So all of the events leading up to the great flood are the result of God planting our world on the front door of an abyss covered in darkness, Satan abusing his authority by tempting man into disobedience, God catching him in the act and cursing him, then instigating Satan against mankind by informing him that one of Eve’s descendants will eventually defeat him.

This ultimately leads us to our final point.  We see the darkness that God called the Night.  We see the Light God called the Day.  And after God cursed the shining one, Eve and Adam, God divided the light from the darkness through an act of atonement he performed by sacrificing an animal and covering Adam and Eve in that animal’s death.

While it may seem unfair to some that God needed to kill an animal to cover Adam’s death for something Adam did, we need to understand that Adam was of greater value to God than one of the animals He had made.  We may contend with God regarding why that animal’s sacrifice was even necessary, but in doing so we show our own ignorance of something evil understands only too well.

When God said, “Let there be light,” there was light.  An omnipotent being always gets what he wills.  When God willed that, “should Adam eat from this tree, he shall surely die,” Satan thought he had God cornered.  Tempting man to eat? Piece of cake(fruit)! Then, just as light had to exist when God spoke it, God’s favored creation would have to die if man fulfilled what God had spoken.  This is why God had to sacrifice an animal in the meantime. Not because it could redeem Adam, but because its substitute for Adam reminded God of a time that would come when Christ’s perfect substitutional sacrifice would fully atone for Adam’s sin.

You will notice in Genesis 3:21, that while God offered a process of atonement for man, he gave no such offer to the dragon.  In doing this, light was separated from darkness through the curse of all, and the grace of atonement for man.  Thus we get a glimpse of the seriousness of the conflict between light and darkness on Day 1.  What at first seems like an innocuous passage regarding the pre-existence of darkness, the creation of light and the dividing of light from darkness is actually an epic battle being waged over the putting down of the dragon’s dominion and his stronghold the abyss, but more importantly, it is the execution of the first step in God’s redemptive plan for mankind.

Adam lived for 930 years which fits well within the span of the first Millennial Day of 4000 BC to 3000 BC.

Introductions

Introductions to stories can be a tricky business.  If an author fails to captivate his reader for any reason, he risks losing his audience for good.  Credibility is the easiest thing for a writer to lose; and when he exchanges it in favor of seemingly absurd claims he does so at the demise of the reader’s suspension of disbelief. No book is immune to this, not even God’s word.  Genesis chapter 1 is the first chapter of the first book of the Bible.  In it, God describes the creation of the heavens and the earth.  But ever since science began its exploration of the past, the mounting evidence against the young earth described by scripture has cast the credibility of the story into doubt. The question we are left with after carbon dated rocks, starlight, fission track dating, geomagnetic reversals, ice layering, space weathering, lunar retreat and a myriad of other proofs: is the Creation Story even still relevant? In the face of such overwhelming evidence, it would seem unlikely. Yet through the course of this work, we will discover that not only is the Creation Story of Genesis 1 still relevant, but it is not as easy a thing for science to discredit as atheistic scientists would have us believe.

The Creation Story is the most familiar of Bible stories due to its location in the scriptures.  Anyone who has ever opened the Bible to begin reading it has likely started where everyone else has: the beginning.  But how many of us have taken the time to truly meditate on this passage of scripture to find out all the things it really has to say? Let me show you a few examples of what I mean rather than simply taking my word for it.

The First Story

Did you know that of the 1,189 chapters of the Bible, the Creation Story is the only story in the Bible that shows God doing something that is not in response to something man has done or is going to do?  Scientists might call this the control group, for the passage gives us a snapshot of God’s behavior at a time when man’s behavior was not an influencing factor.

After reading things in the Old Testament or going through a terrible personal crisis, many individuals are left with a negative view of God as this harsh, cruel, or evil being.  But if we reference the control group and examine God for the five days before man even existed, we see a different picture altogether. What we find God doing in the first five days is creating light in the midst of darkness, dividing the dominance of the waters of the deep over the Earth, bringing the land out of the water and giving it life, creating the celestial bodies of the heavens including the stars, creating the sea and sky creatures, and then the land creatures.  Only after everything else has been made, does God form man from out of the dusts of the earth.

Now stop and think about all that for just a moment, because it disguises the profound.  Everything described provides the foundation for man’s life on earth.

Imagine for a moment a world full of blind men, how would we have survived as a species?  Or suppose the waters of the deep still dominated the surface of the earth, such that whole continents experienced flooding on a regular basis.  After some of the dire warnings given by ecologists and environmentalists regarding the threats to our oceans, perhaps you can get an idea of what our oceans would be like without any sea creatures; the water would stagnate and a staple of the human diet would never exist.  If there were no plants or land animals, there would be no air to breath and no food to eat. In short, everything God did during the five days prior to the sixth was for the express intent that man be the beneficiary of His work.

Yet even after understanding that, do we truly appreciate the fullness of what God did through his work?  Sometimes the only way we ever learn anything is if we try to do it ourselves.  So what would this look like if it were all carried out by a human being?

Imagine a father decides one day to spend the next five days, morning and evening, building the most amazing toy his imagination has ever fathomed for his unborn child.  While certainly a sweet and sentimental thing for a father to do, there are plenty of men who shop and work hard to provide for their unborn children.  But which father does these things  five days prior to conceiving of his unborn child with his wife?

More to the point, this amazing toy he makes in just 5 days, is so beyond the scope of our comprehension that one could spend an entire lifetime awake and asleep with it and never fully explore the height, depth, or breadth of all the wonders it contains.  Study deeply that perspective for a moment, because aside from anything else you may think you know about God, that is what the Bible describes as His nature when man is not in the picture. Which illuminates the rest of the Old Testament under an altogether different light.  Any criticism leveled against God’s behavior during the Old Testament immediately casts our own human condition into suspicion as the culprit, rather than God.  After all, what we see regarding God, when He is left to his own devices, is a thoughtful, caring, generous and loving Creator.

Now let’s take a look at how the Creation Story actually uses the criticism science levels against it to uncover hidden truths regarding this passage of scripture.

More than Meets the Eye

The Creation Story tells us that on the fourth day, God created the stars.  Science has shown us that the stars we see in the night sky are light from other suns.  In some cases, the stars we see are actually from distant galaxies that are themselves made up of many suns.  As all astronomy students learn, stars often come with planets.  Many of these planets are made of gas, but some of them are made from rock and ice. And as any geology student knows where there are layers of rock, there are mountains and if there is ice, there may be water and from water come seas, oceans and an atmosphere, complete with weather systems.

The point of all of this is to demonstrate a discrepancy in God’s own described behavior.  It took him five days to create our solar system, world and everything in it, but through science we understand that when God created stars on the 4th day He demonstrated just how vast his Creation abilities are. Again, the relevancy may not at first be clear until we attempt to do it ourselves.  But for this example we need only defer to our common experience in Math class.

When math teachers stand at the front of the classroom working out a problem from the book on the board for the class to see they often take their time and show their work.  But let us be clear, most of them can work those problems out in a fraction of the time.  Some do not even need to write anything down but can solve the problem in their heads.  What we have discovered then is that the story of Creation is in fact God showing his work regarding a complex problem.  There can be no doubt to this.  To claim otherwise is to suggest that the creation of life on Earth is somehow more costly for God’s omnipotence than spinning fifty-sextillion other Earthlike planets into being in the span of a 24 hour period whereas it took him six days to complete our own.  The logic, much like the math, simply does not add up.

The Master Plan

This brings us at last to the foundation for understanding the relevance of Genesis 1 in the 21st century.  Consider the nature of God for a moment as an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all present being.  What this nature means is that time is of no constraint to Him.  The past, present and future are always before his eternal presence.  Which means that during the five days that God was creating the Earth in preparation for man; He would be fully cognizant of Adam’s eventual fall in Genesis 3, but more importantly, the scientific discoveries of the 21st century that would eventually challenge the credibility of His word in the minds of His creation.

We know from the Creation Story that God took the time to consider our human needs when creating this world for us.  It likewise stands to perfect reason that He considers our need for authentication to his credibility at our time in history more than ever.  To that end, I will demonstrate through the course of the next six chapters that the Creation Story is more than just a story describing the creation of our world.  Throughout the Old Testament, we see examples of God employing the prophetic to give authority to His messengers and His message.  When a prophet’s word was fulfilled, it authenticated the messenger to the people.  In turn, it authenticated the remainder of the unfulfilled message to his people.  In that way, they could know that God had spoken to them, and that what He had spoken was worth heeding. Similarly, the Creation Story is God’s prophetic word for our generation.  Roughly 3,500 years ago, God explained to Moses how He had created the world.  God could have told Moses anything, even simply, “I created the heavens and the earth,” and left it at that. Instead, God took the time to explain the entire six day process.  We might presume that God did it to give the basis for a seven day week, but then God merely needed to say to Moses, “I created the heavens and the earth in seven days,” and left it at that.

We know, though, that God did not leave it at that.  If we examine the Creation Story we see that God broke the duration of His work up over six days.  As we have already learned, that is five more days than God’s power required.  This tells us there is something God wants us to see within the work He took efforts to describe for Moses to transcribe, copy and pass down from generation to generation.

In Psalms 90:4 we read that to God, “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”

If we apply this conversion rate to the six days of God’s Creation Story we come up with six-thousand years. By counting the extensive genealogies in the Bible, we can compute a starting year of around 4000 BC which means that according to the scriptures, from God’s perspective, only six-thousand years of relevant human history have passed since the Creation Story took place. If we then proceed to break up this huge chunk of time into six consecutive millennia we find that we are able to map a day of Creation against a given millennium of time starting around 4000 BC.  If this pattern is correct, then we would expect the Creation Story to illuminate the course of relevant human history from God’s perspective correlated through meaningful terms and symbols described on each of the six days described in Genesis 1.

Though the table demonstrates a range of nice round numbers, it is important to note that we are dealing with thousands of years.  The purpose of this work is not to provide a definitive answer on the precise year that the Creation Story took place.  It was Archbishop James Ussher who provided the initial starting point of 4004 BC by carefully calculating the genealogies found in the Bible.  But if Ussher’s understanding was inaccurate or his math was wrong, then our starting point would have to shift accordingly.  Which means that his year of 4004 BC would put the end of Day 6 around 1996 AD.  Rather than give credence to one model over another, I have opted for the imprecise year 4000 BC to keep our focus on the elements of the Creation Story and not on date computation.

What’s the Password?

To again put this all within terms from how a man might do this, imagine a writer preparing to write a book.  Since he is a planner he has already thought out the entire story.  To keep him on track, he begins by writing a table of contents at the beginning and marks off each section as its own separate chapter.  The simple designation of “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2” and so on, is each accompanied by a brief description of events that are to take place in his story during that section. But because our author is well-established, he has his detractors and they are ever on the look-out for what his next project is so that they can undermine his work and discredit him before his book is finished.  Knowing this, and being the planner that he is, our author likes to employ a little encoding in his descriptions using symbols, their relationships, and placements to show up his critics in the end by having put the answers right in front of them the whole time, though they never understood it. To accomplish that task, however, our author requires a few things.

1. He has to publish his introduction, long before his story is finished or no one will believe he was the author.
2. He really needs to wait until he has some of it written before publishing his intro so that his detractors see him invested in the project and take his venture seriously.
3. He must prove through the unfolding chapters that his work fully, completely and relevantly fulfills the encoding published in his introduction
4. He must provide the key to decoding his work through his work such that the key authenticates the code and the code authenticates the key.

Once our author has done these things he will have proven his credibility and authenticated his work from the past for the future.  Likewise, once God published his Creation Story through Moses in the third millennium He fulfilled items 1 and 2.  Over the course of the next four millennia the message remained inert waiting until all the necessary events fully unlocked the encoded details described in His Creation Story. So that when we, in the 21st century, neared the end of the sixth millennium we would have all the pieces of the key needed to decode the introduction and see for ourselves that the Creation Story as a table of contents matches both Biblical history up through 33 AD and on into our time in 2014.  This fulfills item 3.

What type of encoding did God use for this venture? Bible codes have had their time in the spotlight, but I do not prescribe to the notion that God would utilize a mechanism so complicated.  Authors have often used symbols in their stories to convey obscured meanings.  Sometimes those meanings are obvious, but many times we must wait until the author defines them for us through the settings and characterizations in which those symbols are represented.  Likewise, to make sense of the symbols we find in the Creation Story of Genesis 1, we must look to the Bible to interpret these symbols for us, rather than applying whatever meaning we might like for them.  By revealing the meanings of these symbols in later books of the Bible, God ensured that Moses and the Israelites would not possess all the pieces to decode the prophecy before the appointed time.  This fulfills item 4.

As we shall soon see, the Creation Story highlights events in human history relevant to God as shown throughout the Bible.  But the Bible stops recording in the first century AD.  This means that while the symbols described in the last three days of Creation may be understood using other symbols defined in the scriptures, the actual events they refer to must be found within our own recordings of human history apart from the Bible.

When we do find them, we discover that God did indeed see our complete human history all the way back from the beginning before He even started His work.  Which means that when God began creating our world, He chose even the particulars of how He worked it to reveal His prophecy regarding the course of the human race from Eternity’s perspective, thus authenticating the message of scripture as coming from the one and only God.

But like all stories, it is only appropriate to start at the beginning, or as God called it: Day 1.