From the 08 Nashville Conference.
http://forums.bible-truths.com/index.php/topic,9502.msg80843.html#msg80843 ---
Gen. 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form (or more like formless, not that it didn’t have any form at all, it was formless) and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
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Some will say, ‘it should read and the earth became without form and void.’ Well, actually yes it did in a sense ‘became,’ but not at this point. Again, the Hebrew here is pluperfect in English. It would more accurately be translated, “and the earth,” and is correct, the word ‘and’ is in there. “And the earth” is one word in Hebrew, it’s erets. There is the word earth and then a sign for ‘and,’ and a sign for ‘the.’ So that’s all in there. It isn’t just the word there, only earth. No, it’s “and the earth.” It’s in there, and the earth was…
Now the only way you can translate that “was,” is if you translated and the earth was - already. It was already void (and vacant) and darkness was upon the face of the earth. But a better translation would be, “and the earth had existed.” Pluperfect English, past tense, had existed. The earth was already this way or had existed in this condition.
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Gen. 1:1 In the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth.
v. 2 And the earth was (or should be ‘was already’ or ‘had become’ or ‘had existed’) without form (tohu - or it should be unformed, not without, everything had form) and void (bohu). And darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
We have water in Genesis 1 and it’s covering the whole earth. Now this is not talking regionally, the whole earth. Because we know there was no land, we have no land until we come to verse 9. So the earth is covered in water. What do the scientist tell us? The earth was covered in water, they tell us the same thing that Genesis tells us. Then there was dry land. Where did the dry land come from? Out of the earth. But it’s covered with water. How does it come out of the earth? Volcanoes.
The whole earth was hot, molten and eventually there was water. Now it’s cooling, it’s forming a crust, volcanoes are erupting.
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They say that the formation of the land and all the volcanic activity… all this stuff was a part of the process of forming the atmosphere, so that more complex forms of animal life and so on could live there.
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mercy, peace and love
Kat