Fear No Fear

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

“but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole surface of the ground.“
Genesis 2:6

The sage Rashi points to this step as the first step in the creation of humanity: ‘It is like a kneader of bread who first pours in water and afterwards kneads the dough — similarly here: He first watered the ground and afterwards He formed man.’

At this point, there does not appear to be rain as we know it. There may not have been rain at all until the Flood. There certainly was no need for rain at the beginning. We KNOW that there is more water UNDER the Earth’s crust than lies on top of it. There is no reason to assume it was unable to rise and lower, showing up as a mist (like dew in the morning) to water and irrigate the land – enabling the further growth of vegetation since there were no human beings to work the land. This practise either ended when humanity showed up to work the land, when the Fall occurred, or after the Flood. We don’t know because God doesn’t tell us. Moses doesn’t seem to have been shown the point when it stopped. But here at the beginning, it clearly worked this way. This is hard to picture because we are so used to the water cycle. But things AFTER the Fall do not work the way things did BEFORE the Fall. Whenever rain first began, this mist is CLEARLY attached to the absence of humanity. Some sages teach that the essence of rain already existed, but that it operated in a different way. That the mist would rise from the earth, condense, and fall to water the ground.

God clearly has a plan. And until that plan fully comes to pass, He has a way for His creation to thrive. In the temporary absence of humanity to till the ground after a rainfall, He has a mist watering the Earth and keeping the vegetation alive. What a great God! A God who can do things differently until the conditions are ripe for His full plan to be known and enacted. This is a wonderful picture of the Noahide covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, the Law of Moses, and the Davidic covenant. Until the conditions were ripe for Jesus to come and make a Way in His covenant (the new covenant), God did things differently. God pointed to the need for a better covenant and taught us the principles of how it would work, so that we would be ready to embrace the perfectly designed covenant and operate as He had designed. In the same way, until there were humans to till the Earth after actual rainfall as we know it, God used a mist. What a great picture of His faithfulness.