Unproductive, Unpopulated, and Dark – Genesis 1:2

It is amazing to sit outside and experience all the sights and sounds of God’s creation, to notice the vast variety of vegetation and creatures, the flora and fauna as it is called.  Our earth is incredibly productive and is proliferating with creatures of all kinds.  But it wasn’t originally so.  Why did God not create it immediately with all the plants, trees, ocean life, land life, and humans.  Why do it in stages?  That is a question hard to answer.  Perhaps a hint of an answer is the delight we see God take in each stage of His creative work.  It pleased Him to work step by step, and, we will see, it set a pattern for our joining Him in ruling over and working in His world.

Now the earth was unproductive and unpopulated, and darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

In the first stage of creation God created a planet covered in water.  In the Hebrew it says it was tohu vebohu (traditionally translated “formless and void”), a rhyming couplet that is difficult to duplicate in English, but that we try to with the phrase “unproductive and unpopulated.”  As Isaiah says, “For this is what Yahweh says—the Creator of the heavens, the God who formed the earth and made it, the one who established it (he did not create it to be a wasteland [Hebrew tohu], but formed it to be inhabited)—he says, “I am Yahweh, and there is no other” (45:18).

Some have taken Isaiah’s statement to make the point that Genesis 1:2 indicates a judgment from God that left the earth “unproductive and unpopulated.”  They suppose a previous perfect and developed creation (verse 1) with a human race that Satan led into rebellion and that God destroyed by a flood, the “watery depths” of verse 2.  But that is really too much to suppose by the words “unproductive and unpopulated.”  This is not what God meant it to stay, but how He initially staged all that is described in the rest of Genesis 1.  He will make the earth productive (days 1-3) and populate it (days 4-6).

But in this initial stage our world was dark.  Does this mean that our solar system with our sun was not made yet, and that light from the rest of the universe was not reaching our planet?  That is possible, or it is possible that a dense cloud-cover blocked out all light from the surface of the planet.  And during this stage, The Spirit of God, God’s Holy Spirit, was hovering over the waters.  In Deuteronomy 32:11 the word “hovering” is used of an eagle hovering over its young in the nest, which implies protecting them and/or preparing them for something good.  The Spirit is preparing the earth for something very good.

In contrast to the creation stories of other cultures in Moses’ day, God is not fighting against chaos and darkness, nor does He have to contend with eternal water or supply it from deceased gods, but rather He is fully in charge of these inanimate things and is fully prepared to shape and use them.

From our understanding of God as a trinity we may now see that each member of the Godhead was actively involved in creation.  Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (8:6).  It is hard to specify what each of their roles were, but each was intimately involved in creating.