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There a number of words that are encountered in the earliest parts of the book of Genesis that add much information and a sense of mystery to the narrative.  There is no reason to believe that these words are intended to make the book mysterious.  It seems much more reasonable to suppose these words are there to add information that would otherwise be missing: they are probably not simple redundancies.  That is the assumption I will work with in what follows. Before we get to the words themselves though, let’s call our attention to the fairly common phenomenon called personification.  Personification occurs when we attach a personality to something that is inherently not even alive.  For example, when we attach too much importance to money, we bring about something we might call “mammon.”   When personification of biblical ideas occurs in our lives, we can expose ourselves to dark influences.  These dark influences can lead us into strange religious attachments that may become quite strong and bring on spiritual perversions. So let’s get to it.  In the very first verse of the bible, we read that the earth was “formless and void” (NASB).  These are fairly simple words that refer to specific status of the earth at its earliest moments.  By simple inference, formless means that the earth did not have a discernible form [...]

In a previous blog, All Their Hosts, I wrote to you about angels.  I would like to expand certain aspects of that discourse in this message.  In particular, we focused on the fact that angels may be considered to be of the substance of the heavens.   In order to come to that understanding, it was necessary to discover the greatest association that angels have in terms of three kinds of realms.  The three were: Eternity (The Eternal), the Heavens, and the Earth.  We all understand that “the heavens and the earth” are the main components of what I call The Creation.  The two main contexts of existence are The Eternal and The Creation (heavens and earth).  In that analysis, we really started with the question of whether angels should be associated with The Eternal or The Creation.  The reason this analysis matters is that most Christians unthinkingly associate angels with The Eternal.  In fact, though, angels are created beings.  Thus, angels are associated with The Creation and not The Eternal.  More specifically, we examined the relationship that angels have with the heavens, rather than with the earth.  In essence, Genesis 2:1 leads to the inference that angels were created within the context of the creation of the heavens.  Thus they are of the substance of the heavens.  This is not a technical or theological [...]

I used to have the view that God was just hanging out in heaven with His angels.  What I thought (without thinking) was that the group (God and angels) would have discussions from time to time and that, in one of those conversations, they concocted the idea of creating things.  They even seemed to have conversations during the creation process.  For example, God is quoted in Genesis 1:26 as having said, “let us make man in our image according to our likeness” (NASB).  In my mind, that used to be a clear indication that He was ordering or soliciting the help of the angels in the making of Man. Of course, you probably see some holes in my thinking.  First, it appears there were no heavens in which God could just hang out.  Genesis 1:1 claims that God created “the heavens” on the first day of creation.  So, they were not previously in place for Him to hang out.  I know that most of us know what I said above was kind of silly.  Of course there were no heavens for God and His angels to hang out in – at least not before The Creation had been created.  So that brings us to another problem. With that information in hand, I would need to modify my perspective.  In the updated [...]