'God said' - God expresses his will and it happens immediately! Wow!
Genesis tells us that the world had a specific beginning, developing in stages and becoming increasingly complex:
- Day 1: light and dark
- Day 2: water and sky
- Day 3: land and sea
Something I noticed for the first time this time round of reading (and how many times have I read Genesis 1??) is that it's a strange 'evening and morning' as there is no sun or moon yet! But we'll discover tomorrow that the sun and the moon merely mark time, they don't control it. We also start our days with morning and finish with evening, but God created it the opposite way round. How could this change my view of timings?
I love how C.S. Lewis shows the creation of the world of Narnia in his book The Magician's Nephew:
And really it was uncommonly like Nothing. There were no stars. It was so dark that they couldn't see one another at all and it made no difference whether you kept your eyes shut or opened. Under their feet there was a cool, flat something which might have been earth, and was certainly not grass or wood. The air was cold and dry and there was no wind... In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost though it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth itself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it... Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped about - single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time... The Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter. And now something else was happening. Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing... The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.
Now I know that the sequencing of the creation of Narnia is not the same as the order of creation for Earth, but I find it really helpful to think of the Voice creating all of Narnia just by singing.
Back to the Bible to finish off... Each outcome (v 4, 10 and 12) is described as 'good'. God has declared his creation as 'good' and we should enjoy it as such. 1 Timothy 4:3-5 tells us that everything God created is good and we should receive it with thanksgiving.
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