![]() The expanse, or aerial space, in which this arrangement of things has been effected, having received its appropriate name, is recognized as an accomplished fact, and the second day is closed. Having once attained to this majestic conception, man is so far prepared to conceive and compose that sublime sentence with which the book of God opens, - "In the beginning God created 'the heavens' and the earth." This is the third heaven 2 Corinthians 12:2 to the conception of which the imaginative capacity of the human mind rises by an easy gradation. Then, by a still further enlargement of its meaning, we rise to the heaven of heavens, the inexpressibly grand and august presence-chamber of the Most High, where the cherubim and seraphim, the innumerable company of angels, the myriads of saints, move in their several grades and spheres, keeping the charge of their Maker, and realizing the joy of their being. Then the heavens come to signify the contents of this indefinitely augmented expanse, - the celestial luminaries themselves. ![]() Then it stretches away into the seemingly boundless regions of space, in which the countless orbs of luminous and of opaque surfaces circumambulate. We have here an interesting and instructive example of the way in which words expand in their significance from the near, the simple, the obvious, to the far and wide, the complex and the inferential: The heaven, in the first instance, meant the open space above the surface in which we breathe and move, in which the birds fly and the clouds float. This expanse is, then, the proper and original skies. The cooling, moreover, of the earth’s surface would produce cracks and fissures, into which the waters would descend, and when these processes were well advanced, then at the end of the third day “God saw that it was good.”īarnes' Notes on the BibleThen called God to the expanse, heaven. But no sooner did it exist in a fluid form than the pressure of the atmosphere would make it seek the lowest level. In both there was a separation of waters but it was only when the open expanse reached the earth’s surface, and reduced its temperature, that water could exist in any other form than that of vapour. Probably, however, the work of the second and third days is regarded as one. ![]() The work of the second day is not described as being good, though the LXX. In Genesis 1:1, “the heaven” may include the abysmal regions of space here it means the atmosphere round our earth, which, at a distance of about forty-five miles from the surface, melts away into the imponderable ether. The Hebrew probably means the heights, or upper regions, into which the walls of cities nevertheless ascend ( Deuteronomy 1:28). Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(8) God called the firmament (the expanse) Heaven.-This is a Saxon word, and means something heaved up. ![]()
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