Read with Me
Genesis 1:9-13 (HCSB)
Then God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land “earth,” and He called the gathering of the water “seas.” And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.” And it was so. The earth produced vegetation: seed-bearing plants according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. Evening came and then morning: the third day.
Listen with Me
On the third day of creation, God performed two acts. The first was raising dry land out of the watery depths of the earth, thus making two distinct zones or habitats: the land and the sea.
The land that God raised up had a basement layer of rock, but the upper layer was soil that was habitable for plants. As God had Moses describe this new land before he created mankind on day six in Genesis 2:5-7, the land was very moist from being under the surface of the water. So, even before the first rains occurred, the land was full of moisture, to the point that for a while the water continued to seep from the ground in the form of springs, which fed into streams, which in turn flowed together into rivers.
The second creative act was to cause this moist ground to bring forth the first life on earth in the form of plants. This included all kinds of plant life, from algae to fruit trees, from grasses to grains. And Moses was careful to include the fact that these plants were created to be self-reproducing. They included seeds and spores within them, which meant that God didn’t have to create each generation anew.
After this spate of creative activity, God pronounced all he had made on this day “good”. This was the second indication of “goodness” God had made. The first was when He judged the light “good” on day one (1: 4).
In these cases, the word “good” is not a moral judgment. Instead, it means that the things God had created had come into existence in the physical realm exactly as He had planned them in the spiritual realm. They would do exactly what God had purposed for them. They would be conducive to nurturing the life as He created it on each successive day.
Some have questioned how the plant life could have survived without the sun existing yet. But this objection has two very simple answers. The first is that the sun, moon, and stars would be created the very next day, less than 24 hours later. And the second is that the light that God created on day one, even though it did not come from a physical source like the sun, had been made with everything in it that was needed for the photosynthesis systems in the plants to begin to function until the sun was created.
Pray with Me
Father, a big part of our problem with simply accepting Your first-hand testimony about creation, how You did things and the order and timing You used, is that instead of just reading and accepting Your testimony as You revealed it through Moses, we bring to the text tons of our own human ideas about how things must have happened. Then we must cut, reshape, squeeze, and reinterpret the text to accommodate those human ideas. But Lord, You created our minds, our intellects, and even our languages. So, You are perfectly capable of communicating to us clearly how You did everything if we will simply take You at Your word. Thank You, Lord, for loving us enough to show us all of this. Amen.