Moving on to the second day of the Creation Week, we see that the Bible says in Genesis 1:7 that God separated the waters that were above the firmament from the waters that were below the firmament. The "waters below" included the oceans, and above the oceans is the firmament, or atmosphere. Now let's consider what God was doing on this second day of the Creation Week. Genesis 1:1 tells us that God created the earth, but it was an earth that was formless and void, according to Genesis 1:2. The earth in the beginning had no structure. God had not begun to put structure into the earth on the first day of creation. Now on the second day of the Creation Week God was beginning to structure His world.

Here we see another parallel with the Christian life. Spiritually speaking, Christians are redeemed in an instant. The act of salvation is instantaneous, but the process of Christian growth takes a lifetime. In the same way, God spoke on the first day of the Creation Week and the earth and the heavens sprang into being (see Note 3). But then God chose to take six days to structure His creation, and the structuring process began on the second day of the creation week.

Here is a clue as to why God used a certain finite period of time to make His earth and His universe. After all, God could have structured the entire universe in an instant, but He chose to take time to work out a plan of structuring His creation to teach us that He does indeed take time on occasion to work out structure in that which has no structure. There is one great difference, though, between each Christian and the physical universe. The Creator spent only six days structuring the entire universe, but He spends a lifetime on each one of us! How much that says about the great value of each person! After all, one human life, the Bible says (Matthew 16:26), is worth more than the entire cosmos.