Genesis 1:9-13 “Then God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear"; and it was so. (10) And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good. (11) Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth"; and it was so. (12) And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. (13) So the evening and the morning were the third day.”
The next step in God’s creation of the earth is given to us in the above quoted passage of scripture. As we have already seen, the creation event recorded as taking place on the second day in Genesis is scientifically estimated to have taken place 14 billion years ago. The creation event recorded as taking place on the fourth day in Genesis (which we will discuss in the next section) is scientifically estimated to have taken place 4.5 billion years ago. And so, this creation event of the Lord separating the seas from the earth and creating the plant life on the earth, would have taken place between 14 billion and 4.5 billion years ago. Although scripture records this creation event as taking place in one day, i.e. the third day, in the natural, this aspect of God’s creation took place in two stages. The first stage was the separation of the seas from the dry land. This was the first time that the dry land of the earth had been revealed since its creation. The fact that God said in this passage “let the dry land appear”, confirms to us that the land was always there but that it had been submerged under water. Researchers led by Dr. Antony Burnham at the Australian National University, in their study of the oldest rocks ever found on earth (Jack Hills of Western Australia), say that 4.4 billion years ago, the earth was a barren, mountainless place, and almost everything was under water. Only a handful of islands poked above the surface.[1] And so, although scientific research confirms the truth that the earth was initially under water, their conclusion about the date of the appearance of dry land, i.e. 4.4 billion years ago, although close to the scriptural date of prior to 4.5 billion years ago, remains slightly flawed.
The second stage of God’s creation on this day was His creation of plant life on the earth. In effect this means that God created the plant life on the earth even before He created the sun. So how was it possible for the plant life to survive without sunlight? If you recall on the first day of creation, God created light. That light remained in place from that point onwards, and was present throughout the creation account until God created the sun, and so the plant life that God created would have been exposed to that source of heavenly light. We have already established that there was no rain during that period, and that God watered the earth by a mist that He made to go up from the earth (Genesis 2:5-6). And so, the plant life that God created flourished in the soil of the earth, the mist that watered it and the light that it was exposed to. So why did God create the plant life before He even created the sun? He did that, because the earth needed an atmosphere to protect it from the sun that He was about to create. Without an atmosphere to protect it, the sun’s heat would have penetrated to the earth’s surface causing the temperature of the earth to rapidly start rising, thus causing the earth’s water to start boiling off into steam that would have floated off into space.
The earth’s atmosphere has two major components, i.e. nitrogen which accounts for 78 percent, and oxygen which accounts for 21 percent. Volcanic activity is a major contributor to the nitrogen in the earth’s atmosphere, and after the Lord caused the dry land to appear between 14 and 4.5 billion years ago, there was a significant amount of volcanic activity on the earth (far more than we experience today) which released the required amounts of nitrogen into the atmosphere. This brings us to the oxygen component of our atmosphere. Most of the earth’s oxygen comes from tiny ocean plants (phytoplankton) that live near the water's surface and drift with the currents. Like all plants, they photosynthesize i.e. they use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make food and a by-product of photosynthesis is oxygen. The carbon dioxide that the plants needed when God created them was released through volcanic activity, and as we have already mentioned, the light they needed was provided by the light God had created. The earliest fossil evidence of plant life dates to roughly 3.5 billion years ago named Cyanobacteria.[2] These were among the first to start producing oxygen and thus the early stages of photosynthesis began. And so, for billions of years all plant life on earth were single-celled organisms, made up mainly of bacteria and algae. Although the oldest fossil evidence of plants discovered thus far, is estimated to be 3.5 billion years old that does not mean that older plant fossils will not be discovered in the future, for as we have already mentioned, scientific discoveries are continually playing catch-up with the bible. And so, once the plant life God created had released the required amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, the earth was then ready for the next step in the creation account.
Michael E.B. Maher
[1] Universe Today, May 12, 2017 by EVAN GOUGH
[2] Introduction to the Cyanobacteria, Berkeley University of California
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