Basic Genesis cosmology 4: other things before the beginning

[Interplanner]

1, section titles
2, the heavens
3, 'formless and void'

4 other things before the beginning

While the Bible speaks only about life on earth, we find that it is not geo-centric. "The universe is full of angels, beings, entities"--E. Goodrick, Multnomah U., Greek. It's just that the Bible only mentions these other things as off-stage.

As for other things before the foundation of this world (it would be hard to say that a 'formless and void' place that was ruined by God in displeasure was founded; surely, He means after that) we find several statements by Paul and Christ.

The Father and Christ loved each other before the world began and considered the creation of mankind to be a risk of love, as when a family weighs the risks. Given how quickly Satan appeared and disrupted things, the venture was very risky. Believers were elect in Christ (the emphasis being on Christ alone). So God was doing other things, and earth was one of them.

In Eph 3, we find out that the unity of the church of both Jews and Gentiles indicates to those in the spiritual realms that God has been victorious over the divisiveness of the law and possibly religion. For a while, the law was a force that was dividing. (Eph 2B-3A). But now that the nations receive the blessings promised to the fathers in Christ, it is unified.

The reason for grouping the law with religion is found in the expression 'the weak and miserable elements of the world' in Gal 4 and Col 2. Paul puts the law (dietary, ceremonial things) in that bucket. In Col 2, you had a neo-Judaism that was trying to revive all that. That's why Paul cut the ground from under it. Compared to what we have in Christ, it was the scum of world religion all over again.

 

[Interplanner]

The reason for adding this item to cosmology is to make it clear that the Bible is not about a "closed system of natural causes and effects"--F. Schaeffer. There are several fronts on which all kinds of things are going on in the universe, if we are going to be fully Biblical. YECs tend to neglect this whole range, focusing only on the 6 days. That won't work. If God is acting now and then into his creation in an open system, and if Satan is out there trying to ruin it, on both the personal and universal level, there has to be a wide range of things going on that reinforce this.

There is.

 

[patrick jane]

you keep re-starting the same thread !!!!!

 

[Interplanner]

There's 8 parts to this. I don't like long posts, so I numbered the items. This one is on other things before the creation/forming like 'formless and void.' I didn't repeat 1-3, except for the names of them.

 

[6days]

While the Bible speaks only about life on earth, we find that it is not geo-centric. "The universe is full of angels, beings, entities

Ex. 20:11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day

 

[Interplanner]

As I said before that is not consistent with Gen 1 and does not need to be.

You have a knack for avoiding what matters in a text and its context. In that Ex 20 context, the Canaanite identification of nature with and as God has been totally disrupted. That's why Israel is being staged to go specifically to that area of the middle east, so that people traveling between the 3 continents will hear that there is the Creator, the LORD, and he is not identical with nature and fertility rituals.

Ex 20 refers to those things that matter to earth--the sun, moon, firmament and earth etc, because that is what matters when speaking about Canaanite religion. God is separate. It is not an answer about the pre-existing conditions of 'formless and void', about why the earth was blackest darkness, about the amount of time it took for 'formless and void' to develop etc.

Stick to the purpose of a line; don't go against it.

That's why you have completely fumbled what 'formless and void' in Jer 4:23 means and invented your own.