January 14th

Genesis 1:1-2:4 is establishing God as the all-powerful and single creator of the Earth, the Heavens, and Earth’s inhabitants. From the text it seems that God alone created the Earth and the Heavens, and then created the universe to revolve around it, bringing “lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night,” (Genesis 1:14), being the moon, the stars, and the sun. Each creature is blessed by God, especially the humans that are created on the sixth day because they are made in God’s own image as the sovereign force on Earth under God. Many times, after God creates a new aspect of Earth and the universe, the text says something like, “And God saw that it was good.” This shows that God is using wisdom and good judgement to make all of His decisions, reevaluating His work and deciding it’s goodness. Over the course of six days, God creates the world that we know, and then on the seventh day, He rests. An all-powerful God should not need to rest, so it cannot mean to recover or refresh. I think it simply means that he stopped creating, because His creation was beautiful and complete. This might have been His way of stepping back and letting His creations begin life on their own without His constant guidance. God had no more need of creating new things or improving Earth and its functions because He had already made his creations perfect. God explains that He left the first two humans all the resources they would need, so it is valid for Him to step back with no further advancement.