Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“God called the dry land “earth”, and the gathering together of the waters he called “seas”. God saw that it was good.“

Genesis 1:10

‘Earth’ and not simply ‘dry land’ because earth has within it more than a lack of moisture. It is always pregnant with POTENTIAL. The name ‘earth’ is also a word that applies to ANY part of the globe not covered in water. Deserts, mountains, plains, beaches, valleys; they are all ‘earth’. Earth was not a distinct entity, but with almost limitless characteristics.

Notice that at no point does God separate the dry land and the water. He GATHERED, but did not SEPARATE. This is illustrated by there being no firm borders (eg. the flux of tides). Also, if He had separated them like He had separated light and darkness (which cannot coexist in the same space), then the Flood would have been impossible.

God called them ‘sea’ meaning collected in one place, but used the plural ‘seas’ because they are made up of different regions. There doesn’t exist a single name for all the various bodies of water. They are all a ‘sea’, but individual characteristics define them individually within that collective designation. After all, fish end up in all of them, but even the same species of fish develop different flavour profiles depending on their particular environments. Or as Siftei Chakhamin puts it: ‘for in Spain, the fish are better.’

God looks and calls the waters GOOD, because He has now completed His work with water that He began in day two. Whenever God completes a creation, He observes it, names it to give it permanence, and then calls it good – because He creates NOTHING bad (James 1:17).