> General Discussions
Ray's Teaching on the Creation
Gina:
--- Quote ---Meaning: what does the "and the even and the morning..." mean,
--- End quote ---
This has had me a bit bewildered too and I'm glad you brought it up. Why does God zero in on the evening and the morning? Why does He not simply say, "and there was night and there was day"? And why does He say "and there was evening and there was morning"? Is God telling us that evening turned into morning where nothing took place because God only works in and by the "light"? I don't know.
Dave in Tenn:
Just from memory, two things about 'evening and morning'. 1. They are processes, not events. 2. They represent moving from disorder to order.
Gina:
Oh thank you, Dave.
As found in Ray's notes:
--- Quote ---Evening: Gloominess, disorder, chaos�.a period of increasing DARKNESS.
Morning: a period of first development, beginning, the coming of LIGHT.
WHY? Why darkness before light? Why chaos before order and unity?
Notice how Onkelos translates Gen. 1:31 A God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good [Onkelos a unified order] and coming is it to be evening and coming is it morning, a sixth [yome/day/time]
Chaos to unified order. Do we have examples of just how this works? Yes we do, and we are looking at one of right here in Genesis One. ... .
--- End quote ---
http://bible-truths.com/Notes/Mobile2009.htm
It's coming back to me...
Gina:
Found this in his notes too, which goes in line with what I said about God only working in and by the light:
Exo 20:11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. [There is absolutely no indication that God *made* anything in the DARK!!]
I'm sure I heard it from Ray first.
Kat:
Okay I have tried to compile enought points, in a condensed form, of what Ray taught about 'evening and morning' from the '08 Nashville conference to help pull it together for us.
http://forums.bible-truths.com/index.php/topic,8385.msg68318.html#msg68318 ----
The “evening and the morning,” I knew that evening carried a connotation much deeper than the setting of the sun. And that morning carried a much more significant spiritual, symbolic meaning than the rising of the sun. When it says.
Gen 1:5 …And coming is it to be evening and coming to be morning, day one. (CLV)
v
People think that early Christians and early scholars that they all believed that the earth was created recently, a couple thousand years ago, in six days. They did not! All major Jewish cabbalist and rabbis and historians who know the Hebrew well, did not believe that. They knew that there was a deeper meaning to that evening and morning, it did not represent day and night or a day.
v
Gen 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night…
How simple is this? Why don’t we believe the scriptures? The light of the sunshine is day. When the sun goes down it is no longer day, it’s night and God says so.
v
So, the light is the day, that’s what a day is. How long is it? Well, it’s when the sun goes up until the sun goes down. How many hours is it? Let’s ask our Lord. How long did Jesus Christ say a day was?
John 11:9 Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day…
v
He (an emailer) says, That the phase of the evening and the morning is repeated six times in the creation account. Were it not used then we would be justified in assuming that these could be longer periods of time.
No. Since it IS used, we have a pretty sound reason for why they are longer periods of time. He says if they, were not used then we might think that these were literal solar days of 24-hour duration. No, just the opposite.
Evening and morning has absolutely nothing to do with the length of the time period that is being discussed. Has nothing to do with the length of the time. Evening and morning have to do with a condition. The evening is a condition that comes about at the end of a day. Morning is a condition that comes about at the end of a night. So don’t be coming up with definitions of stuff that don’t exist. Evening is as it begins to get dark, going from daylight to darkness. That transition period is the evening. As it goes from dark to becoming light, that division there between darkness and light, that is called morning. It doesn’t last for three hours or six hours or twelve hours, like a day and a night do.
v
So yom is not for a 24-hour period. It stands for time in general, days, weeks, months, years, eons, ages.
Another interesting verse is Genesis 1.
Gen 1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day (yom) from the night;
How about that. Is a day and a night, a day? No, God divided them. They’re two different things. He divided the day from the night, how can they be the same thing? So when He says, “and the evening and the morning were day one,” that could be millions or billions of years. There is no time limit set on that whatsoever. None.
v
Psa 90:1 A Prayer of Moses the man of God. Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
v. 2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.
v. 3 Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.
v. 4 For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
It interesting that just these couple of verses brings in all this, the creation of the heavens and earth, a thousand years are as a day and so on, it’s all in there.
v.5 Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.
v. 6 In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.
What do we have here? This is what it is telling us in Genesis. Morning signifies order, light, birth, growth, progress. At night things get dark, gloomy, they become fizzy, you can’t see them anymore. It’s chaos to cosmos.
Here He is using the evening and morning exactly into that context. In the morning they are like grass, but in the evening they are cut down. The morning is positive, growth and light. The evening it’s cut down, darkness and death. They say, ‘no where else in the Bible these words are used.’ Well you just read it didn’t you. Did it mean sunset? That a person is born at sunrise and he dies at sunset? Well yea, it can be used that way, but it could represent his whole life, not 24 hours.
So here you see the symbolism of evening and morning portrayed perfectly. One has to do with progress and order and light and life. The other has to do with darkness and death. So we do have an example as to what these words mean, don’t we.
v
I showed that Onkelos translated Gen. 1:1 “In wisdom, God created the heavens and the earth.” Onkelos had his own translation on this too, rather than saying “God saw everything that He had made and behold it was very good (Gen. 1:31).” Here’s how he translates it and this is marvelous, this was a man 1850 years ago translated this verse. Now he knew something, he didn’t just make this up. “And God saw everything that He made and behold it was a unified order.” Well what was it before? Chaos.
v
In the beginning God had already created the heavens and the earth. The heavens would have already included the sun and of course it included the earth. But there was no earth like we understand it. The word earth means ground anyway. There was no ground, it was covered with water and chaos. And the sun wasn’t shining, you get that on the fifth day.
v
Quotes from the book by Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder will appear in italic.
The Hebrew for evening is ‘ereb’ and this is the literal meaning of the word, although the root of the word carries with it implications far beyond that of a setting sun. What is the visual sensation of an evening? Darkness begins, objects become obscured and blurred. The root of ereb means just that, mixed up, stirred together, disorderly.
The Hebrew for morning is ‘boqer’ it’s meaning is quite the opposite of ereb. Morning brings the first light, objects mingled by the dark of night become distinct entities. This is the root meaning of boqer; discernable, able to be distinguished, orderly.
It is interesting that Jesus Christ died and was buried in the evening. When did He rise? In the morning.
Had the text said that it was morning and then evening, our concept of a day might have been better satisfied. But the sequence is included in here, it always starts with evening. There is a systematic flow of disorder, chaos or evening to order - cosmos, order or morning. To appreciate this rarity of flow of disorder to order we must at this point acquire more understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy, chaos, out of order. Not order out of chaos. The laws of thermodynamics that control the universe is bringing something that is orderly into disorder and chaos, everywhere always.
v
Now comes the major psycho-physiologic question; If the universe trend is towards chaos, why is there order at all?
If the basic laws of physics dictate that orderly things slow down, get colder, deteriorate and go from order to chaos, why is there order anywhere in the universe? It seems to defy the laws of thermodynamics, which work on everything, always everywhere.
The ordered complexities of life is clearly extraordinary. The universe might have remained the mass of randomly moving electrons, protons and assorted subatomic particles, present at that first speck of time referred to as “In the beginning.” If such were the case we would not be here to wonder about it or the overriding purpose of this flow of the universe from it’s state of the Big Bang to the form we observe today.
The Author of Genesis thought this flow towards order was sufficiently important and exceptional, to emphasize it at regular repartition, “and it was evening and there was morning.”
Because everything else in science and in the universe goes the other way. But God is making this go contrary to that. Life is different. Life is special.
v
The Biblical text describes this localize progression from less order to more order as a flow from evening to morning. Or more accurately from ereb to boqer.
v
Onkelos that translates where it says everything “was very good” and he says everything was an “unified order.” At that point it was a unified order. What was it before? It was chaos, then every created period went from chaos to order… from chaos to order… from chaos to order until finally at the end of the six periods, everything was a unified order. That’s how God got rid of the chaos. God uses a process. Why does He use that process? Why does He do a lot of things? God does strange things.
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mercy, peacde and love
Kat
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