Was the Sun, Moon, and Stars actually created on the fourth day of Creation...

[Armchair Apologist]

Imagine a pile of bricks that eventually becomes a two-story colonial house and the wall around the estate, and the walks and patios in the gardens.

Now imagine the builder indicating that pile and saying, The kitchen's right there, I just haven't put it together yet. In that sense, kitchen was without form and void, but it was there. The whole estate was there, at the time it was just a pile of bricks. The Deep was the pile of bricks from which God formed the earth and the heavens.

Just to be clear, I don't mean the earth was a ball of rocks and dirt in the Deep, I mean that the earth was part of the water of the Deep, and that God formed the earth, and everything else in the universe, from the waters of the Deep. The earth and all the elements were made out of water...it's elements rearranged and combined...fused...into all the elements that we have discovered and classified in chemistry class.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...

Boom. The Deep is there. Then the process begins.

This is a simple picture of what is described in Genesis 1, accepting Moses's statement that the heavens and the earth, and all they contain, were made in six days.

View attachment 14272

I might just have to borrow this illustration for our Wednesday Bible Hour! Last week we had a great discussion arguing over the "Light" and whether we could make the case for an actual 24-hour day. We got through verse 8 which would place us in the middle part of this illustration.

Of course this illustration seems to suggest "Geo-Centrism" which may make for another interesting argument here! Could God create the sun on the fourth day and, at this time, set the earth in orbit around the sun and the sun in orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy while also keeping "Planet Earth" in the center of this universe as shown in the illustration on the right?

 

[Ben1445]

I might just have to borrow this illustration for our Wednesday Bible Hour! Last week we had a great discussion arguing over the "Light" and whether we could make the case for an actual 24-hour day. We got through verse 8 which would place us in the middle part of this illustration.

Of course this illustration seems to suggest "Geo-Centrism" which may make for another interesting argument here! Could God create the sun on the fourth day and, at this time, set the earth in orbit around the sun and the sun in orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy while also keeping "Planet Earth" in the center of this universe as shown in the illustration on the right?

It doesn’t really matter whether you are geocentric or heliocentric. The only thing we are sure of is that there is movement between objects and that there is change between the placement of objects relative to each other.

I personally am Theocentric by persuasion.

 

[Aaron]

But not left over fossils from a previous creation gone sour, ruled by Satan.

When I read without form and void, it means that there is nothing there except the basic elements.
I could agree better with your illustration if you could say that there was only the material to make the bricks in their most basic molecular form. And yes I meant molecular not atomic. Water is molecular.
But all this is in response to people who believe that satans dominion of the earth was destroyed and covered with water which is supposed to explain fossils, Atlantis, and anything else that is not expressly given to us in Scripture.

I think you're arguing against the gap theory, but now it's not clear to me.

Oooh...okay. I reread your deal on 2 Peter. I still think you're arguing against the gap theory, which is good, I think you're mistaken in your identification of the willingly ignorant. They are those in the last days who scoff at the promise of Christ's coming, and assert a sort of cosmological uniformitarianism...that the processes observed today have been the same from the moment of Creation until now. They'll say things like, "The speed of light tells us that the stars had to pre-exist day 4 of Creation."

For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. - 2 Peter 3:5-6 ESV

Noah's flood explains the fossil record.

 

[Armchair Apologist]

I personally am Theocentric by persuasion.

Me too!

 

[Aaron]

I might just have to borrow this illustration for our Wednesday Bible Hour! Last week we had a great discussion arguing over the "Light" and whether we could make the case for an actual 24-hour day. We got through verse 8 which would place us in the middle part of this illustration.

Of course this illustration seems to suggest "Geo-Centrism" which may make for another interesting argument here! Could God create the sun on the fourth day and, at this time, set the earth in orbit around the sun and the sun in orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy while also keeping "Planet Earth" in the center of this universe as shown in the illustration on the right?

Feel free. A symetrical expansion in the midst waters would seem leave the seas and the dry land that appeared under it in the center or very near it as well. I guess it could have been an asymetrical expansion, but then the physicists would have had no need to explain their observations with a Big Bang. My point in making that illustration was to better explain how a straightforward reading of Genesis excludes the water canopy theory and the idea of a reconstruction of the earth after some kind of cosmic devastation. The scale of the expanse mind-blowing, however, and obviously nothing I could come close to representing. The earth could be offset a few lightyears and still be considered to inhabit the center.

The Big-Bang-rejecting astrophysicists I've come across describe themselves as being Galactocentric. But geocentricity today doesn't mean what it did to Ptolemy or Aristotle. A geocentrist today doesn't believe the earth is the center of the solar system. Geocentricity means that the earth is in the center of mass of a rotating universe, and by virtue of such location is motionless. The planets of the solar system orbit the sun, and the sun is carried around the earth by the gravity of all the other stars and systems in revolution around the earth.

A perfectly legit model scientifically, I'm told.