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Classical Liberal Arts Academy

Biblical Studies I

Lesson 1.   The Seven Days of Creation (Genesis 1-2:3)

by Dr. Nathan Schmiedicke  |  Need help?  E-mail Support

1.  Lesson

Lesson Directions:  Read the following lesson carefully.  You must know everything in it to pass your lesson examination.

Why did God create the world?

He didn't have to do it. It does not make Him better or more perfect.  It does not make Him happier than He is, in any way. He is already perfection itself and has perfect happiness in Himself. He does not need to create us or anything else. So then why did He decide to do it? In this first lesson, we are going to learn a very important part of the answer to this very important question. But before we get to the answer, we need to learn some basic things about the Bible and how to read it.

The Bible is made up of the Old Testament and the New Testament

The Old Testament tells the story of God's creation of the world and mankind, the fall of mankind, the election of Israel, and the promise of a messiah. It is divided into three main parts, each of which is covered in one year in this program. The three parts are the Law  (or Pentateuch), the Prophets, and the Writings. The New Testament reveals the coming of the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ, and his establishment of the Church until the end of time. It has two main parts, each of which is covered in one year in this program. The first part is the Gospels, which record the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The second part is about the Apostles, which records how the Apostles carry on the work of Christ in the world until the end of time. So the Bible covers from the very beginning of time to the very end of time and the most important times in-between!

The Old and New Testament are made up of several books

There are 46 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament, for a total of 73 books. The word "Bible" comes to us from the Greek phrase "ta biblia to hagia" which means "the holy books."  The Bible is a collection of holy books, also called "the Holy Scriptures" or just "Scripture." They are holy because God, who inspired different men throughout history to write them, is their Divine Author. That is why you will sometimes hear the Bible referred to as "God's word." The Bible is called "Scripture" because Scripture means something that is written down. Today, Bibles are printed in large quantities by computers and machines, but up until the modern era, each and every Bible was written and copied by hand!  

Each book within the Bible has its own name

There are two basic kinds of names given to the books in the Bible. The names of the books are either a description of the book or they are the name of a person. Those that describe the book describe:

1. What events happen in that book, such as Genesis, Exodus, or Acts of the Apostles.

2. Or they describe what type of literature that book contains, such as Proverbs, Psalms, and Lamentations.

Of those that are the name of a person there are also two kinds.

1. Sometimes it is the name of an important person in the story, such as Judith, Esther, or Tobit, and:

2. Sometimes it is the name of the human author of the book, such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, or Luke.

Each Book is divided into chapters

A long time after all of these books were written, people who studied and wrote about the Bible wanted an easier way to find or tell about a specific part of a specific book, so they divided each book up into smaller units called chapters, which contain a large portion of each book. For example, the first chapter of Genesis contains the whole story of the first six days of creation, from when God created light on the first day until he created Man on the sixth day. In this way, whenever someone wanted to tell someone else where the creation story was in the Bible, they could just tell them the name of the book and the number of the chapter and the person would know right where to look for it--in Genesis chapter 1, or more simply, Genesis 1.

Each chapter is divided into verses

The chapter divisions helped a lot, but then scholars wanted to get even more specific, so they divided up the chapters into even smaller units called verses, which might be only a sentence or two long. That way, people could be more precise about which part of the Bible they were talking about. So, if a scholar wanted to refer someone to just that part of the Bible where God first created the animals, he could now give: 

• the book name = Genesis

• the chapter number = 1

• and the verse number = 24

This is written like this-- Genesis 1:24, which means "Genesis, chapter one, verse twenty four."

To make it even easier to write, scholars would shorten the names of each book. So, for example, instead of writing Genesis 1:24, they would just write Gen 1:24. If they wanted to refer to more than one verse at a time, they would write it this way: Gen 1:24-31 which means "Genesis chapter 1, verses 24 through 31." You can usually find a list of abbreviations for book names in the front of your Bible.

So, if you open your Bible up to the first page of the Book of Genesis, the large number 1 that you see at the beginning is the chapter number and the tiny numbers you see written next to the words are the verse numbers. As an exercise, find Gen 1:24 and read it. Find Genesis 1:28 and read it. In what verse of Genesis 1 does God say "Let there be light"? How would you write that? If someone asked you what God says to the man and the woman the first time He speaks to them, what chapter and verses would you tell them to look at? How would you write it? This way of writing the chapter and verse divisions is very simple but also very useful, so be sure to master this before moving on.

Unless you are reading in Hebrew, you are reading a translation

All of the books of the Old Testament were first written in the Hebrew language, but about 300 years before Jesus was on earth, it was translated from Hebrew into Greek.  The New Testament was written in Greek. After this, throughout history, the books of the Old and the New Testament were translated into many, many different languages, more languages than any other book in the world. We will learn more about this later, but it is important to realize that you are reading the Bible in a translation and that there are many different translations that exist, even within one language.  There are, for example, dozens of English translations. So it may happen that the Bible quotations in your lessons may not be exactly the same as the one that you have in your translation of the Bible, even though you are reading the same chapter and verse. You can use the translation your family prefers, but be aware that there are others.

The Book of Genesis is the first book of the five books of the Law

The Law is also called the Pentateuch, which is from Greek and means "five books." The Book of Genesis covers the story of God and his people from the creation of the world up through the death of Jacob-Israel, with his family in the land of Egypt. The name "Genesis" is a Greek word that means "Beginning." Many of the titles of books in the Bible we have today come from their Greek names. In Hebrew, the first book of the Bible was called "Bereshith" which in Hebrew means "In the Beginning." In Greek this was shortened to just "Genesis" which you already know means "Beginning." This is a fitting title for this book because it reveals the beginning of everything that God did in creation.

Genesis 1-2:3

For this first lesson, you will be reading Genesis 1-2:3, which means Genesis, chapter 1 through Genesis chapter 2, verse 3. This covers all seven days of creation.  Catholics and the Jewish people before them have always held these first chapters of Genesis to be among the most important in the whole Bible. This is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about them:

Among all the Scriptural texts about creation, the first three chapters of Genesis occupy a unique place . . . The inspired authors have placed them at the beginning of Scripture to express in their solemn language the truths of creation - its origin and its end in God, its order and goodness, the vocation of man, and finally the drama of sin and the hope of salvation. Read in the light of Christ, within the unity of Sacred Scripture and in the living Tradition of the Church, these texts remain the principal source for catechesis on the mysteries of the "beginning": creation, fall, and promise of salvation. (CCC, 289)

In the first two chapters of Genesis we learn that the good God created a good universe for a good purpose. He called everything into existence so that it could share in and enjoy His own life, goodness, and beauty.

God Created Everything

You have studied in your Catechism that God created the universe out of nothing (ex nihilo). It might seem like Genesis contradicts this by saying that there were waters already there "in the beginning" but this is not the case. The waters are there in Gen1:2, but they don't exist apart from God's creation of them, which is what Gen 1:1 makes clear--God created the "heavens and the earth," which is the Hebrew way of saying God created everything because the heavens and the earth encompass all creatures that exists. The author also used a special word for what God does when he "creates" something. The word in Hebrew is barah. In the whole Bible, this word is only used when talking about what God does. Many people in the Bible will "make" things or "build" things or even "start" things, but only God "creates" things, because only He can bring things into existence out of nothing. And nothing can exist apart from God's creation of it.

God parts the waters with a simple command, and orders them to stay in their place. He is very much in charge of the waters. For all of the living things on land, the great waters are a threat. God's word brings order to the universe and pushes the waters back so that life can exist on the earth. The waters represent the "formlessness and void" which God's command pushes aside and replaces with order and fullness and good. We will be seeing the waters again in the story of Noah and in the story of the crossing of the Red Sea in the Book of Exodus. 

Genesis 1 is very orderly and so is God

The God revealed here is a God of order. The life, goodness, and beauty of the creation come from the order God gives it. When things depart from God's order (which we will begin to see a lot of in Genesis 3) they become evil and ugly, and they experience death, not life. This is especially true of man who is made in the image and likeness of God. Orderliness is next to Godliness.

After Gen 1:2 the story follows an orderly pattern. God will command something to come into being and then it does. God does further work on the thing that now exists, sees that it is good, names the thing, and then each day of creation ends with "there was evening and there was morning, the second (third, fourth, fifth, and sixth) day."

The orderliness is also seen in the order in which God creates things. First he deals with the simplest non-living things: light, the sky, the dry land and water. Then he goes on to living things: first the simplest of living things (plants) then later the higher living things, animals, and lastly, the highest living thing in the material creation, Man, made in God's image and likeness. God is a careful worker, and yet nothing is hard for Him! He speaks and it comes into being. Before he creates Man, he creates a world in which he can live, and in which he will rule all lesser creatures. Before he creates the animals, he creates the plants that they need for food; before he creates the plants, he creates the earth, air, water, and light that they need for their food.

Another way of seeing this is in the following chart, which shows how days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6 match up. The first set of three days prepares for and is completed by the second set of three days. For example, day 1 tells about the creation of day and night while day 4 tells about the creation of the "rulers" over day and night—the sun, moon, and stars. Day 2 tells of the creation of water and air while day 5 tells about the creation of the "rulers" over the water and air, that is, the animals that live in the water and air. And so on.

You will also notice that Genesis 1 repeats the phrase "and God saw that it was good." In fact, it repeats it seven times: the first six times it says that God saw that "it was good." But then the seventh time it says God saw that "it was VERY good."  Take a few minutes and find and count all of these in your Bible and if you want to, underline them or highlight them with a marker. There are many other "sevens" in this story. For example, in Hebrew, the first sentence has seven words and the second sentence has two times seven words (14)! There are also the seven days.

The reason for all of these sevens can be seen if we learn a little more about Hebrew, which, as you remember, is the language in which the Old Testament was written. In Hebrew the word for "seven" and the word for "perfect" are spelled exactly the same way, so "seven" is a symbol of perfection or completion. But all of these sevens help to make the same basic point: what God has made is so good that it is perfect.  When there are seven of anything in the Bible, it can be a way of saying that it was perfect or complete. So, saying that the creation in all of its parts was good six times and then adding the seventh saying "it was VERY good" was like saying that this creation was so good that it was perfect--God's world was complete--there couldn't be a better one!

The seven "Goods" help to show two very important things:

1. Obviously, they show that Creation itself is GOOD.

2. But more importantly they tell us that the God revealed in this book is a GOOD God; GOD IS GOOD!

 You can't give what you don't have and everything to which God gives existence is good, therefore, since God's creation is perfectly good God Himself must be even better! God, who is so good, sees and loves his good creation.

This is the first part of the answer to our opening question: Why Did God create the world? He did it because it was good, and very good, to do so. God is so good that He wanted to share his own goodness and blessedness with others outside of Himself. He creates because He loves. He gives of Himself, not because He needs to, but freely from love. (We will read later in the Bible that it can even be said that God IS Love! 1 John 4:8) In showing this fact about Himself in the first pages of the Bible, God already shows us how we should act, without even giving a command. If we only have goods without sharing them, then we aren't acting like God does. It is in the nature of true Goodness that it shares what it has with others freely and generously.

Man is created in the image and likeness of God and completes God's creation

When he created everything else, God simply commanded it to come into existence: "Let there be light! Let there be land! Let there be plants! Let there be animals!" And they all were. But with man, God does something different. He says "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." This indicates that God takes especial care with making man and that man, in a special way, comes out of God's own being, his own inner life,  similar to the way children come from their parents and are "in the image" of their parents. Later on in Genesis, for example, we will hear about Seth who was "in the likeness" and "after the image" of his father Adam (Gen 5:3). It is only after God has created Man that he looks at the whole of creation and sees, for the seventh time, that "it was very good." Man brings God's work of creation to completion.

 However, this does not mean that there is nothing else left to do in creation. There is in fact a great deal of work to be done. God appoints Man, male and female to do this work by giving them a command:

"Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth" (Gen 1:28).

This is the FIRST commandment given to mankind in the Bible. It is very important because in it God calls man to do the two things that we have already seen God Himself doing:

1. To share their goodness with others = "Be fertile and multiply and fill the earth."

2. To bring order out of disorder = "Subdue it. Have dominion..."

 We are called to act like God acts! Some people think that the perfect world would be one where we didn’t have to do any work, but this isn't what Genesis says. The perfect creation for man, who is made in God's image, is not a world where man sits idle and is entertained constantly. God wants Man to be like Him, to work with Him, not just to be entertained by him. The perfect world for man is one that is not totally done. It is a world that requires work, a world where man can add his efforts to God's. Man is called to take what God has given and work with God's help to bring it to completion. This gives Man the chance of lifetime--the chance to work alongside God in the biggest project of all--ordering the whole creation back toward God!

This is a world with no death

After God gives this first command, he also gives man "every plant bearing seed...and every tree bearing fruit" for food. Then he gives all of the animals "every green plant" for their food (Gen 1:29-30). This talk about food might not seem very important at first, but it shows something wonderful about God and what He wants for the world He has created: There is no death in it! Animals don't kill green plants when they eat them because they just grow back from the roots; Man doesn't kill a tree by eating its fruit. In God's original plan for the world, there was no death, anywhere at all, in the whole world!

The Seventh Day of Gen 2:2-3 is the Goal of Creation

God creates order and life in the world and he commands Man, who is in God's image, to "fill the earth" with that image, to make the whole creation something that by its very life reveals and glorifies God. You might think, in reading up to this point, that the goal of the whole creation was Man because everything points to him and it all seems finished with him. But Man himself is meant to direct himself and the whole creation back to God. Even though Man is the best thing in the material creation, even Man has a further purpose--to bring all of creation into the seventh day of God's rest.

This is the second part of the answer to our opening question: Why did God create? God created Man as a kind of priest who is called to offer the whole creation, and his own work in that creation, back to God. This is what the seventh day in Gen 2:1-3 is all about. It is a day which God "hallows" or makes holy. Creation itself isn't the goal--God is! God and his creation resting together in love with each other is the goal.

How does Genesis tell us that this is the real goal, the real end? When we come to the seventh day it has no "evening and morning," no end or purpose, no further step or goal beyond itself.  We already learned that the word for seven and the word for perfect were spelled the same way. Well, now it is time to learn that there was yet another word spelled the same way: the word for taking an oath or making a solemn promise. If I wanted to say "I solemnly promise" in Hebrew I would say, "I seven myself." It sounds funny in English, but this is how the importance and perfection of a solemn promise was made clear in Hebrew. This makes the seventh day a day of perfection, but also a day of promise--in it God completes his creation, but also makes a solemn promise to his creatures, especially Man, that He will bring them into His Sabbath rest if they are faithful to his command. The Sabbath rest of God in his creation, and his creation resting in Him, is the goal, the final answer to the question of why God created. The Sabbath, because it is God and his creation resting together with one another, and because it never ends, is thus an image of Heaven. On the Sabbath, the whole creation becomes a temple in which God promises Himself to Man, and Man, the priest, offers himself and the whole creation back to his Creator in worship.

Other Peoples did not understand God or Creation

Now, some of these ideas might seem obvious to you if you have studied your catechism well, or because you have read about them since you were little, but they were not at all obvious to the people of the time during which Genesis was written, nor are they obvious to many people of our own time. Many other people around the land of Israel had their own ideas and stories about how the world came into existence. One of these stories, called the Enuma Elish, was written in Babylon, a land east of Israel. The Babylonians were the worst enemies of the Israelites later on in their history.

When the story of the Enuma Elish was first discovered, some people thought that because it told a somewhat similar story of how creation happened, this meant that the story of creation in the Bible was nothing special--just one story of creation among all the different stories that were out there. But this was wrong. As time went on and scholars began to compare the two stories, they began to see that in every case, even when the two stories seemed similar, they were in fact saying completely opposite things about God, the creation, the purpose of Man in creation, and the relationship between Man and God. The following chart shows some of the most important examples of this. 

These differences point to an important truth. Although the Israelite people were just one tiny group of people among all the many peoples of the world, they were also the most important people because they were God's chosen people. They were the people to whom God revealed Himself and His plan for the world. Every culture in every place and time has had some kind of an explanation for why the world exists and what the purpose of life is. Sometimes, they even got some part of the answer to these questions correct. But Israel had the most complete and best answers to these questions, free from error, because only they had the true God reveal these truths to them.

Genesis 1-2:3 corrects the false ideas about God and the world at the same time as it reveals the fullness of the truth about them. Not only are God and creation both good, but they are called to be together in the endless Sabbath that God will give after Man, like God, has completed his work. And the work which God gives Man is the work of ordering and directing the creation back to God.

SUMMARY

In this lesson, you have learned the major divisions of the whole Bible. You have also learned how to read and understand biblical references and begun practicing your knowledge by reading Gen 1-2:3, the seven days of creation. This part of the Bible reveals how the good God created a beautiful, good, and orderly universe out of nothing. He created Man, male and female, in His image and likeness and called him to participate in God's work of creation by filling the earth with God's image and by ordering the whole of creation back to God in the rest and worship of the seventh day, which is an image of Heaven. In our next lesson, you will learn more about how man accomplishes the work God gave him to do.

2.  Memory Work

Directions:  The following questions help you to memorize the most important points of this lesson.  Commit them perfectly to memory and have a parent or praeceptor quiz you to test your mastery before taking your lesson exam.

2.  What are the two parts into which the Bible is divided?
The Bible is divided into the Old and New Testaments.

3.  What is the Old Testament?
The Old Testament is that part of the Bible which tells the story of God's creation of the world, the fall of mankind, the election of Israel and the promise of a messiah.

4.  Into how many parts is the Old Testament divided?
The Old Testament is divided into three parts:  the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.

5.  What is the New Testament?
The New Testament is that part of the Bible which reveals the coming of the messiah, the establishment of the Christian Church.

6.  Into what two parts is the New Testament divided?
The New Testament is divided into two parts:  that which narrates the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, called "the Gospels", and that which narrates the life and teaching of the Apostles.

7.  How many books are there in the Bible?
There are 73 books in the Bible:  46 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament.

8.  How are the books of the Bible named?
The books of the Bible are named by a description of what they contain or by the name of the book's main character or author.

9.  How is each book of the Bible divided?
Each book of the Bible is divided into Chapters and Verses.

10.  In what languages was the Bible first written?
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.

11.  What is the Pentateuch?
The Pentateuch is another name for the five books that make up "the Law" in the Old Testament.

12.  What is the first book of the Pentateuch, or the Law?
The first book of the Pentateuch is Genesis.

13.  Why is the book named "Genesis"?
Because it tells the story of the beginning of the world.

14.  What is contained in the book of Genesis?
The book of Genesis contains the story of God and His people from the creation of the world through the death of Jacob, with his family, in the land of Egypt.

15.  What is the first part of the book of Genesis?
The first part of the book of Genesis is the story of creation, found in Genesis 1-2:3.

16.  What does God create on each of the seven days of creation?
On the first day, God makes day and night.  On the second day, God makes water and air.  On the third day, God makes dry land and plants.  On the fourth day, God makes the rulers of day and night.  On the fifth day, God makes the rulers of the water and the air--the birds and fish.  On the sixth day, God makes the rulers over the dry land and plants--the animals and man, who rules over all.  On the seventh day, God rested.

17.  What does the story of creation  teach us about God and the world?
The creation story teaches us that God is orderly and good, that man is made in God's image to know, love and serve Him forever.

3.  Reading Assignment

Directions:  The following reading assignment is required for this lesson.  Your lesson examination will test your careful and complete reading.  You may read the Bible online using one the links below.

4.  Lesson Examination

Directions:  When you have completed all of your assignments above, complete your lesson examination. 

Complete Lesson 01 Examination.

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