4: Les Feldick Bible Study Lesson 1 Part 4 Book 1 – Attributes of God: Genesis 1:1-5

Now in this lesson let’s come back to Genesis chapter 1, and we might as well begin with verse 1.

Genesis 1:1

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

We’ve been talking about that for the last three programs, and now as we move into verse 2, years ago this verse shook me up, and of course I didn’t have an answer for it.

Genesis 1:2

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

Now from my understanding of the word “created” which is “Barah” in the Hebrew, and I’ve even read some Hebrew commentary on it not too long ago, that the word meant“perfect creation.” In other words God did not create the mess as I call verse 2, because when you look at that verse the earth is under flood water, it’s void, or of no use, and yet that which evidently God had created perfectly in verse 1 must have been without a flood, and yet here in verse 2 it is void, and under water.

Now I’ve learned over the years to call verse 2 “The First Flood,” and Noah’s was the second. Well what happened here in verse 2? Why did God destroy that original beautiful earth that He had created by the word of His mouth? Well naturally something cataclysmic had to have happened, and I think the best way we can find the answer for that is go to the Scripture itself. I know some theologians will disagree with me, but just as many will agree, but this is the way I feel the most comfortable with this whole idea that between verse 1 and verse 2 something terrible happened, so that God had to destroy the earth with a flood. So now let’s turn to Ezekiel chapter 28, and we’ll begin with verse 13.

Now I don’t take this approach just simply to pacify the evolutionist concepts of the billions of billions of years of time. No way at all. I don’t do this to just simply insert the geological ages of time, which I don’t agree with. I don’t agree with the evolutionist approach whatsoever. I’m a creationist, and believe that in the beginning God spoke the Word, and everything was created as He wanted to create it. But I do have to feel that after a certain period of time, and I don’t know how long that was, it might have been 5 years, or 500 years, or even 5 billion, I don’t know, and again my answer is, “So what!” But I do feel that there was an interruption because of something that drastically took place, and I think we can begin to find that answer in Ezekiel chapter 28. Here God is speaking through the prophet Ezekiel, and he writes to this personality:

Ezekiel 28:13

“Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tablets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou was created.”