Remember God is Sovereign. With the same Powerful Divine Word of Day One, God speaks and Day Two comes into existence. Just as Day One was preparation for a suitable place for man to live, so Day Two continues with the same pattern. Day Two is powerfully connected to the salvation account of the Flood in Genesis chapters 6, 7 and 8. As we shall take quite some time before we reach those chapters I’ll link Day Two’s events to the Universal Flood of that time.
1) Day Two
Ge 1:6 And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
(1)
The first matter to observe is that God did not fail in speaking this part of creation into being (v6) and so needed to act further to fashion or complete what He spoke (v7). Verse 6 is a statement clause and verse 7 is how what He spoke was fulfilled. (2) Remember verse 2? “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The picture is that there was this formless, empty earth that was totally covered with water. We are not told, but the depth of the waters were such that nothing was visible. As we have said previously, as things were, it was impossible for man, let alone any land or sky … or even sea creatures to exist. Even the sea creatures would have been without food because plant life on earth or in the sea had not yet been created.
(3) For man and creatures to live on earth, God needed to remove some … or most of the waters. After this, as shall be seen on Day Three, God allocated water to be stored as seas so that there would be dry land.
(4) God created an expanse by taking the waters (plural) and dividing or separating it into water and water (singular). Perhaps to grasp it better, there was upper and lower waters with an expanse between the two. The word “expanse” is an interesting word. It means something that was beaten out, spread out, stretched out … and it is the spreading out of air that surrounds the earth as an atmosphere.
(5) The water above the atmosphere created a curtain or a canopy.
Isa 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
This curtain or canopy that surrounded the atmosphere was a water curtain or canopy. Although the sun had not been created, the purpose of this canopy was a protection for the earth from the severe rays of the sun. The ultraviolet radiation (UV) from the sun is very dangerous. The strongest penetration is between 10am and 4pm. Its powerful strength is such that even on a cloudy day you can become sunburned by UV radiation. So, in the wisdom of God, this protective canopy prevented man from being sunburnt, which would cause all sorts of diseases. For example, overexposure could cause premature aging and skin cancer. There is also the potential of blinding eye diseases where eye protection is not used. So … the water above the atmosphere canopy was for protective purposes.
(6) The water below is the water on the earth itself that would later be seas, rivers and damns. Generally this would be used for drinking water, irrigation and for sea creatures to exist in.
(7) God called this atmosphere sky. This helps us understand that when we look upwards, we see “sky”. How high the sky stretched before the water canopy above it is not known.
(8) God ended this the third day with an evening which would be followed by the morning of the next day.
2) Where did the water for the Genesis Flood come from? This is an interesting question. We read:
Ge 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
(1) All the springs of the great deep burst forth. Remember that on the third day God created the seas and dry land so these seas cannot be referred to. The house I owned in Villieria, Pretoria had a borehole. Although the underground water table started at 5 meters deep, our hole was at least 25 meters deep. Our opposite neighbor has a 40 meter deep hole. The water table there starts at 25 meters. When more than four kilometers underground in a gold mine shaft I saw water in many areas with pumping systems transporting water to underground reservoirs. The earth has “oceans” of water within it. So in some miraculous way, God brought the waters in the earth upwards … all the springs of the great deep burst forth.
(2) The floodgates of the heavens were opened. This is not water in clouds as we know today. This was the water God separated from the water below (on the earth) and above the canopy God created in Genesis 1:7. It rained for forty days and forty nights … for forty, twenty-four hour periods nonstop. All the waters stored above the canopy came raining down on the earth. To get a feel of how much water this was … consider:
Ge 7:17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.
Right or wrong I don’t know, someone did a calculation and says 1,085,166,768 miles³ of rain would have been needed to cover the earth so that the highest mountain (Everest) was covered. Where did the bulk of the water come from? The water forming the protective canopy. How long did it take for the water to recede?
Gen 8:3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
The volume of water must have been huge for it to take so many months (more than seven) for the water to recede sufficiently before Noah and his family could leave the Ark. Sadly sin caused the flood and the water canopy protecting the race from the ultraviolet radiation of the sun was lost. Perhaps the great lesson to learn today is the awful consequences of sin.
Father, You are so great, almighty and powerful that our limited mental faculties cannot grasp the magnitude of Your creative skill, design and power. Lord, even though life on earth is hard and difficult, ridden with all sort of disease because of the fall, help us to keep focused on the New Heavens and New Earth so that we don’t lose hope. Amen.