The origin of evil by tracing the fall of Satan from his original state as the perfect angelic being Lucifer. It explains that Lucifer's pride led him to exalt himself against God, resulting in his transformation into Satan and the introduction of sin into the world, dragging a third of the angels with him. The message then connects this fall to the creation account in Genesis, discussing various interpretations of the timing and nature of creation, particularly the potential gap between God's initial creation of the heavens and earth and the subsequent state of the earth being formless and void, suggesting this period allowed for Satan's rebellion and judgment before God's subsequent creative work.
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We began a series of messages on Lord's Day evening that we called Meet the Angelic VIPs, the very important angels and particularly those who are named in the Scripture. We started out with the angel Gabriel. We looked at all four places where he appears in the Bible, two in Daniel and two in Luke chapter one, and we saw that he described himself as one who stands in the presence of God, that is, in the throne room of God, waiting God's command as to how he can be of service. And we saw that in every place where he occurs, he is delivering a message of greatest urgency, telling people something that's going to happen in Luke's gospel that had to do with the coming of John the Baptist and then Jesus Christ.
and then in Daniel it had to do with things that would come in the future days as well as the first coming of Christ. So Gabriel is the predominant, preeminent messenger angel of the Bible. Then we talked about Michael, the one who is called the archangel, the highest of the archangels. And we saw that unlike Gabriel, he is a warrior angel. He is assigned to the nation Israel in contrast to demonic angels that are behind some of the other kingdoms of the world. He fights for Israel. And in the midpoint of the Great Tribulation time, he will be the one who stands up against Satan. And Revelation twelve says Michael and his angels fought against the devil and his angels.
Satan will be cast out of heaven at that time and no longer have access to heaven. And we saw that Michael got into a dispute with Satan one day about the body of Moses and dared not bring a strong reviling accusation against him. That this was said in a context of not reviling dignitaries and not speaking ill of those who are in authority. So we began to trace the New Testament passages that suggest that the devil has certain great authority on this earth. That even the Lord Jesus did not question when the devil offered Jesus, all the kingdoms of the world, if he would bow down and worship the devil, the Lord did not deny that he had the right to make that offer.
He just simply said it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God only, and him alone you shall serve. So we went back to discover how the devil came into being and asked the question, did God create the devil? Did God create evil? And we said that while the Bible doesn't speak directly on this subject, the answer that Biblical Christians have always held is that no, that's utterly unthinkable, that what God created was good, all was good, and that he did not create a devil. But what he did create was an angelic VIP named Lucifer, spoken of in Isaiah chapter fourteen and Ezekiel twenty-eight, who was created perfect in beauty and in wisdom, had great, great intelligence and beautiful creature.
fell into pride and exalted himself to the place where he said, I will be like the most high, I will be equal with God. And his pride was his downfall, and it caused him to set himself up as a rival to Jehovah. And in that rivalry, of course, he could only be the loser, and judgment fell upon him, and he became the devil. It was his pride that brought evil into the world. but the results of rebelling against God were that he himself became an evil creature. Apparently he dragged as many as a third of the angels with him into a great rebellion of which there is almost nothing said in the scripture.
Someday we will be fascinated to learn more about that history. And so he fell into sin and then later came into the Garden of Eden to tempt Eve and through her to tempt Adam. Now, the series is on the angelic VIPs, of which we only find three named in the Scripture, at least all I could think of. And we've had three evenings, and now we've got two nights left to go. So what are we going to do now? Take up a different subject altogether? No, not exactly. What I want to do in these next two nights is ask two questions that have to do with the fall of Satan and the judgment that fell upon him.
The first question has to do with the earth, and the second question has to do with the human race. The first question has to do with the first two chapters of Genesis, and the second question has to do with the third chapter of Genesis. The question is, how did the fall of Satan or fall of Lucifer to become Satan affect this planet? Where does it fit into the history of the earth? And we are not told that in the Bible, but one thing is obvious. It happened before the serpent came into the garden and tempted Eve. In other words, it happened somewhere in the course of the history of the first two chapters of the Bible, because Eve was tempted in Genesis chapter three.
So tonight we will look at the first two chapters, particularly the first chapter. And then tomorrow night we will ask the question, the same question, what was the effect of the fall on the human race? How does the sin of Lucifer relate to the temptation of Eve? And we will see that there are some remarkable similarities. That understanding what Satan's sin was helps us to understand the nature of temptation and the nature of sin. And we may be surprised to see that the great sin is not the sin of being wicked. an immoral but the sin of trying to be good without God trying to set up a righteous world without the blood of Christ in other words rebelling against God and saying I'm going to be like God not I'm going to be unlike God I'm not saying I'm going to be ungodly but saying I'm going to be like God without God and without Jesus and without the blood of Christ but that's for tomorrow night and tonight we will turn to the first chapter of the book of Genesis and begin to study it And I would like to read a few verses here and then begin to talk about them.
Genesis chapter one, and I'm reading tonight from the new King James version, which is very, very similar to the original King James, but put into our more up-to-date speech. 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 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. 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 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 morning were the third day. 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." 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. Then God said, let the earth bring forth a living creature according to its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth, each according to its kind, and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of all the earth. and every tree whose fruit yields seed. To you it shall be for food. Also to every beast of the field. God did not give the animals to mankind for food until after Noah came out of the ark. So he doesn't say, I have given you every beast. He says, I have given to every beast.
Also I've given to every beast and to the birds and to everything that creeps on the earth in which there is life. I have given every green herb for food. And it was so. He given them the same vegetarian diet. Verse thirty-one. Then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good, so the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them were finished. And on the seventh day God ended 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. All right, there's the story.
On the first day, God called forth light, and with it day and night. On the second day, this water-covered planet saw the waters divided vertically, a cloud cover above and the oceans below. There was no land yet. And the in-between airspace that later was the place where the birds were to fly that we call the heaven where the birds fly, like the birds of the heaven, not the heaven where God dwells. And then on the third day, the continents were raised. The waters were divided and land emerged. And plant life was brought forth by the earth.
It was not said to be created here. The word created is used only three times in the chapter. Plant life was brought forth by the earth. On the fourth day, the sun, moon, and stars were made. Some say appeared because it is a puzzle. It would appear that the sun and moon were all, or at least the sun was already there in verse one when you have the day and the night. And so some speculate that maybe the cloud cover was opened so that the sun and moon appeared. Maybe others feel that the sun and moon were not created until this day, that light was created before them, but not the sun itself. Verse five, the... the sea and air life were created, life in the sea and the bird life.
Day six, the animals came into being, and then God created the human race, man and woman he created. And on the seventh day, God rested. Now what we're looking for is how the story of Lucifer's fall is to be fitted into this account. We will not be dogmatic as to the answer. At least I won't be dogmatic because I don't know. I can tell you what some of the views are here and I can perhaps indicate which view I prefer, but the Bible does not relate anything about the devil in chapter one here nor in chapter two. All we know is that he was in existence by the time you get to chapter three.
We'll talk about how that fits into the picture. And in the process of doing so, I will be talking about several different theories of the interpretation of this chapter, of how God did his work of creation and the timing of it. And before I do that, I want to qualify my remarks to this extent. I am only going to talk about views of Genesis one that are held by creationists. That is by people who try to take the chapter as literally as possible. By people who reject the evolutionary theories of the origin of life. by people who believe, as I do, that God created Adam and Eve, just as He describes it in chapter two, out of the dust of the ground and then Eve from the rib of Adam, that that story is to be taken literally, and I am firmly committed to the truth that God did not, that man did not descend from animals, but was a separate creation of God.
And in all the creation discussion and differences of viewpoint and interpretation, it seems to me that that is the one essential fact that must bind us together and on which we must be dogmatic. Man is not descended from animals but is separately created by God and is accountable to God in a way that animals are not. So I will not be considering views of theistic evolutionists who believe that God took the evolutionary process and every now and then stepped in and somewhere along the line injected a soul into the animal that was coming along. Or maybe not all theistic evolutionists would express themselves that way.
They might be more creationists than I've given them credit for. But I'll not be considering those views, nor the views of those who think these chapters are myths and fiction and nice little stories that come out of the ancient past. I'm not going to talk about those views. Only the views of people who are creationists and who believe that the Bible is the verbally inspired word of God. Furthermore, I'm not going to be discussing science. I was trained in science. I graduated as an electrical engineer. I have enough science to know that I am not an expert on biology, nor on geology, nor on astronomy. Three fields that you really would have to be an outstanding expert on to be able to discuss very much about the scientific aspects of this thing.
I won't try to be an authority on areas where I am not an authority. I will try to talk about the Bible and what it says. see what we can learn from it. In this first chapter of Genesis, there are two main areas that I might call areas of disagreement, although it's not a place where people are disagreeing with each other, but rather it's a place where two different views are rather prominently presented. The first of these views is, what do you do with Genesis one, one? What do you do with the first verse of Genesis? Some people would say that the first verse of Genesis is like a topic sentence for the rest of the chapter.
That is, Genesis one, one says, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Now, let me tell you about that beginning. It was six days long, and this is how it came about, and that verse is simply a topic sentence for the whole chapter that follows, and it is talking about the whole chapter when it says, in the beginning, God created. The other view of this verse... is that it is not a topic sentence for the chapter, but an opening statement of what happened first, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and there was a period when the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and then God began to move on this formless earth.
This Bob Majanya was telling me today that one of the old versions of the original versions of the King James had a marginal reading here that said, a rude lump in verse two. The earth was a rude lump here in the traditional text. The earth was without form and void. And then God began to move on that. And in the sequence of six days, he did this and this and this. In other words, when you start with the first day, God said, let there be light. There's nothing here in verse three about God creating a planet and putting it in motion. Verse three implies that the planet was already there and already spinning. And when God created the light, then there was day and there was night as the planet rotated.
So this view says that the planet was created in verse one and set to spinning. And then later on you come to verse three and the first of a series of six days. You understand those two different interpretations. One says it's a topic sentence. that covers the whole chapter, and the other says it's sequential. It's what happened first, and then the six days follow that. We'll take the topic sentence for you first now. In this view, well, in both of them, I suppose, there's a disagreement on what constitutes a day, when it says the evening and the morning were the first day, or the second day, or the third day. Are we talking about a twenty-four-hour period?
Or are we talking about long ages of time? Is a day here strictly twenty-four hours? Or is it maybe ten thousand, twenty thousand years, a hundred thousand years? The latter view is called the day age theory, that what is being spoken of here are lengthy periods of time. And the other view, the twenty-four hour view, I guess I don't know what you'd call that. Well, the twenty-four hour view will do for that. That is, the twenty-four hour interpretation is the most common now among creationists, but it's not the only one by any means. It's not necessarily the oldest one either. The twenty-four hour viewpoint is held by a group of people who are quite strongly convinced that a day is a day, and the day means a day.
And I wrote an editorial once when I was editor of interest about this, that I expressed some of these different viewpoints that creation has held. and said maybe we ought to keep an open mind and we don't really have to choose between them. And one of my readers was very offended and he started a correspondence with me and he wanted me to retract that whole thing. And he insisted that a day was a day and that's all there was to it and I was practically an unbeliever if I thought that a day was anything else but twenty-four hours. This viewpoint has a very strong argument in its favor. in that the Hebrew word for day here, y-o-m, they say, and I think correctly, is never used to refer to something other than a normal day when it is coupled with a numerical adjective, that is, first day, second day, third day, and so forth.
Very obviously the word is used of a lengthy period of time when you talk about the day of the Lord. And the word is used in the Bible of a long period of time in that connection, and maybe in other times. And we talk about the day in which we're living, and we're not talking about twenty-four-hour days, and we say the day in which we're living. We're talking about the tendencies of our age and so forth. But this group says that the word is never used in that sense when it is coupled to a numerical adjective, like first day, second day. That may be true. That quotation is from the Liberty Bible commentary on page five. The other group cites the fact that the word yom, Hebrew word for day, has different uses right in this very passage.
It is used three different ways in this very context. For instance, it is used of the twenty-four hour period in verse thirteen. The evening and the morning were the third day. They would say that's, or probably that's a twenty-four hour period if such it be. But then in verse fourteen... It says, let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night. Now it's being used of a twelve hour period when the sun is shining and not a twenty-four hour period. So there's two different uses of the word right there. And then when you go to chapter two, verse four, one verse beyond what I read in the opening scripture, you read, This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And here the word day is a period of time, at least one week in length, at minimum one week in length. And later we find the use of a longer period, the day of the Lord. Now this argument is not easy to settle, and for my preferences, I just prefer to keep these alternatives open, and I don't think that I'm qualified to decide which is correct. Many of my friends are, but I don't think that I am. And so I'm not going to tell you which is right. But I think that probably most of you are familiar with the twenty-four hour interpretation. And I would like to suggest some reasons why you might be hesitant in being dogmatic about that.
There are some very good reasons for the longer view. I first heard these when I was just a young Christian up in Newark, New Jersey, and I was working with the Newark Evangelistic Committee. that had gospel rallies and these people were real creationists and had no use for evolution. But they used to sit there in the office sometimes when they had not much else to do. I remember one time I was in there and they had a big argument about whether these were twenty-four hour days or whether they were long periods of time. And these leaders were all Bible believers and so forth. But those two interpretations were common then and perhaps they're common now. First, the passage is described a completed functioning work.
That is, in the first day, day and night were already functioning before you go on to the next step. God called the day, verse five, God called the light day and the darkness he called night, so the evening and morning were the first day. And it sounds like the cycle had already begun and not just halfway around before you start the next one. Plant life, the plant life yielding seeds and reproducing and God seeing that it was good. How is God going to see that this cycle is good if you've only just put the seeds in the ground or put the plant there and it hasn't even had time to mature and drop seeds and those seeds to sprout? So as you read this passage about the plant life, bearing seeds and so forth, you wonder whether there wasn't a little time involved here for the newly created plants to have time to flower and drop seeds and then reproduce before the rest of creation gets underway.
Even more impressive to me is the intense activity of the sixth day. When you get into chapter two, you find that there's an awful lot to crowd into twelve hours. Here's Adam. Adam naming all the animals. Without any experience of having ever seen them before, knowing almost nothing of their characteristics, sees one coming by after another and gives an appropriate name to each one, having only seen them briefly, and then discovering that even the best of them were inadequate to be the kind of companion he needed in his life, and then falling asleep and awaking to discover Eve by his side. I rather suspect that I feel better about the passage if Adam had a little spell tending the Garden of Eden, getting acquainted with the animals, naming them before the excitement wore off and it became apparent that something was seriously lacking in his life.
To illustrate that, let's say that you have never been to SeaWorld. and you go to SeaWorld. And you are a bachelor. And you are absolutely fascinated by that great tank with the sharks swimming around the tank, and you're just overwhelmed by what you see there in SeaWorld. And someone says, don't you feel inadequate as a bachelor? Don't you realize it? that these creatures cannot meet the need in your life. And, you know, you're not particularly interested in thinking about finding a girlfriend at that point. This whole thing is so utterly fascinating. Can you imagine the fascination of Adam with all these animals and to suggest that he had any awareness of the fact that they were inadequate to be the life partner that he needed?
Well, of course, it could be that God knew that. He didn't know it and it was irrelevant to Adam. But it does suggest to us that there may have been a period of time involved in this. And then finally, how to fit the seventh day into the story. If the seven days were twenty-four hours in length, then there would quickly be an eighth day and a ninth day and a tenth. Did God go back to creating again? If he rested on the seventh day, did he create again on the eighth day? Do we not say that creation was finished when God was finished? And that the days, the seventh day at least is a long age, continuing today when God is resting from his creation. If the days are long ages, then we say that with the forming of Eve, creation was complete, finished.
The seventh day is a long period where God still rests from his creation. So those are just some thoughts on the matter, maybe from a side of it that you have not thought too much about before. Now we come back to this other issue of the first verse of Genesis. And look at the idea that it is not a topic sentence, but rather sequential. The first sentence of a narrative, the first step of a narrative, all of it to be read in sequence. In the beginning, God made the planet and the solar system and the galaxy and the universe. Now with a rotating planet, he can start counting days. First, he turns on the lights.
then he divides the waters that shroud the planet he divides the lower waters again for land to appear he puts plants on the land and living creatures in the water and in the air and finally on the land uh... human beings and then he rests all in sequence now to my mind this is the most logical way to understand at least this point and it does give some opportunity to fit lucifer into the picture that uh... The original creation was made by God. And in verse two, the earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep. And that could have gone on for a long, long period of time.
And in that long period of time, Lucifer may have fallen, may have been assigned to his dominion over this earth and fallen into sin so that then God was able to... start doing these days. The Spirit of God was hovering over this planet according to verse two. And the one nice thing about this interpretation is that it does give some, it does seem to make some sense out of the second verse that there was a planet, but it was not shaped in the mountains and valleys, plains and oceans.
It was lifeless, formless. and void of life and also lightless, water covered in the Spirit of God hovering over the planet. Now notice the consequences of this view on the matters of time and dating. The original creation is then totally undated. Ten thousand years ago, ten million years ago, ten billion years ago, the Bible doesn't say, in the beginning God created. Let the scientists and the theorists especially the astronomers, research and calculate, and none of it is a threat to the Bible believer. If you hold that the original creation only took place maybe six thousand years ago, maybe ten thousand years ago, as many of the creationists say, then you have a real problem with this business of light coming from galaxies that are two million light years away, like you can see with an ordinary binoculars.
You have a real problem with the layers and layers of strata in the Grand Canyon or the coal seams deep down into the earth and those who take that view stress the fact they say that the flood was an explanation for all that and they have to suppose a flood that came and went came and went came and went in one year's time laid down all these layers and all these strata and they are into a scientific field and I'm not and they feel they have very good sound arguments for that and I'm not in a an authority to argue those points with them because I don't know how valid all those arguments are. But the effect of it, I know the effect of it.
The effect of that view of creation is to take the focus away from Adam and Eve and onto the flood. So that that viewpoint is even called by its proponents, by Henry Morris and those who hold that view, it's called flood geology. That the flood is the explanation of the fossils, and of the layers and of so much that's in the geology of the earth. And the thing that bothers me about it, and the thing where I feel I am qualified to speak, is that I think the real focus ought to be on the creation of Adam and Eve. We are not animals. We are different from animals, separately created from animals. And then many students will go away to school and be totally unable to accept that that flood geology, who could very well accept the fact that man is not descended from animals, because there's far less problems scientifically to believe that man was separately created.
The theory of evolution about the evolution of the human being takes an awful lot more faith than to believe what the Bible says about God creating Adam and Eve. You know, it's very far-fetched in many ways. It takes an awful lot of stretching of your faith to believe that all all this this marvelous human body just simply evolved from some green slime on some ancient ocean the eyes and the ears and the the marvelous structure of our minds and bodies I just haven't got the faith to believe that I find it much easier to believe that a an infinite God created the human being and I think that's where the focus ought to be now this viewpoint that says that there is a time sequence between verse one and verse three is commonly called the gap theory maybe that's not a good name for it today but it's called the gap theory because in earlier days those who held it like the old school field reference bible those who taught that view said that the beginning creation was perfect that in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and that it was a good earth.
There was nothing wrong with it, beautifully created. And that it became without form and void. And they say this verb was, in verse two, the earth was without form, that could be translated, became without form and void. And the hang-up is on that saying that that's what you can do with the Hebrew verb. Maybe you can. I don't know. I'm certainly not an authority on the Hebrew language. But the idea was, and it was taught by great writers like G. H. Pember, and the man in F.C. Jennings, I think it was, and his commentary on Isaiah and many others who taught this viewpoint, said that then when Lucifer sinned, judgment fell on the earth, and the earth became without form and void.
And they cite an assortment of very interesting passages from the Old Testament, Jeremiah four. I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without form and void, and the heavens they had no light. And the desolation there seems to be an allusion to Genesis one, too, and involves sin bringing judgment. Isaiah twenty-four one, behold, the Lord makes the earth empty and makes it waste, and turns it upside down and scatters abroad its inhabitants. Isaiah forty-five, eighteen, for thus says the Lord who created the heavens, God himself who formed the earth and made it, who has established it, who did not create it in vain. He formed it to be inhabited. Hence the gap idea. The idea is that God created the earth perfect, but the fall of Lucifer, not mentioned in Genesis one, brought on the judgment conditions of verse two.
That's something happened between verses one and two. That's the gap. And the passages of Isaiah fourteen and Ezekiel twenty eight suggest that this is certainly a possibility. It says of Lucifer in Isaiah fourteen, is this the man who made the earth to tremble, who did shake kingdoms? Possibility is fascinating, but it's not proven to my mind. It depends on seeing a greater meaning in these passages that can be just read out of them. But if we accept the fall of Lucifer as related to a chaotic earth, we have no clear proof that it became that way after verse one of Genesis.
And so there's been a backing away on the part of the people who hold the gap theory, a little backing away from the way that gap theory was originally presented. So if you take the new Schofield Bible, you find this note on verse two, without form and void. This is the note from the new Schofield Bible. Two main interpretations have been advanced to explain the expression without form and void. The first, which may be called the original chaos interpretation, regards these words as a description of an original formless matter in the first stage of the creation of the universe.
That's original chaos. The second, which may be called the divine judgment interpretation, sees in these words a description of the earth only, and that in a condition subsequent to its creation, nor as it was originally created. In other words, the New Schofield Bible says, maybe, yes, maybe their judgment fell on the earth and it became without form and void, or maybe that's the way it was originally. It still recognizes the idea of the possibility of a long interval of time there, but doesn't come in very strongly on the idea that the judgment fell on the earth. at that time now I want to summarize this because my time is just about up here I want to read the new Schofield note from Isaiah forty five eighteen and then make a couple of statements in summary and conclude this message and then tomorrow we'll go on to Genesis chapter three Isaiah forty five eighteen this is one of the scripture passages that suggests the divine judgment interpretation of Genesis one, one and two.
This interpretation views the earth as having been created perfect after an indefinite period of time, possibly in connection with Satan's sin and rebellion against the most high. Judgment fell upon the earth and it became empty or waste. Another indefinite interval elapsed after which the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters in a recreation of the earth. Some of the arguments for this viewpoint are Only the earth, not the universe, is said to have been formless and empty. Two, the face of the earth bears the marks of a catastrophe. Three, the word rendered was may also be translated became, as indicated above, became formless and empty.
Four, the Hebrew expression for formless and empty is used to describe a condition produced by a divine judgment in only in only other two texts where the two words appear in conjunction Isaiah thirty four eleven and Jeremiah four twenty three five such a prehistoric divine judgment would throw some light on Satan's fall and the peculiar relation he seems to sustain to the earth that is his authority over it and six this interpretation leaves room for an undetermined period of time between the original creation and divine judgment. Adam created after the events of Genesis one, one and two was the first man.
We have seen then that Genesis one can be interpreted by Bible believing people in different ways, two different ways, each of them having two variations. Number one, Genesis one, one is a topic sentence, a simple sentence encompassing the six days of creation. And those six days may be taken either as twenty-four hour periods or as long ages of time. Perhaps the weakness of that view is that it doesn't find much place for verse two and for the fall of Lucifer. The other main category is that Genesis one-one is sequential, previous to the six days. It describes an initial undated creation followed by a period of unknown length when the earth was formless, lightless, and lifeless before the six days began.
There may or may not be a gap between verses one and two. And again, the six days may be either twenty-four hour periods or longer ages of time. In either case, the second category makes it easier to fit in the fall of Satan and helps us to find some answers to these great questions. Did God create the devil? No. He was a fallen angel. And where did sin come from since it predated Adam? Now let's bow our heads in prayer, and tomorrow night we will go to chapter three and talk about the effect of Lucifer's fall on the temptation of Eve. Father, we thank you for the word of God.
Oh, Father, what marvelous statements are here. In the beginning, you created the heavens and the earth. And then you said, let us make man in our image and our likeness and created a human being who has not evolved from animals, but made in your image. with an accountability and responsibility to you that no evolutionist can account for. We pray, Heavenly Father, that you'll help us to understand these scriptures, help us not to be unnecessarily dogmatic about them, knowing we'll understand more of these things someday, that there were no eyewitnesses around in those days, and we have to fall back on what you've told us and you haven't told us a great deal about it, but just given us this marvelous account that we've read and followed.