It is wonderfully and literally true that “in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17) and that this “creation week” took place nearly 6,000 years ago, just as indicated in Scripture. But, what many miss is that the planet Earth and the heavens around Earth were already in existence at the beginning of that week!
We read in the very first verse of the Bible, before the events of that week, that: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). As we will see, that initial “beginning” of the earth and the heavens—before Adam and Eve, and before the animals and plants with which we are familiar—may have occurred long, long ago!
But notice carefully the second verse of Genesis, which many read right over, missing its clear implications, because of its usual translation: “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). A simple statement—but it contains much more than meets the eye! The English words “without form, and void” are translated from the Hebrew words tohu and bohu. These two words, used together in Scripture just three times, indicate an uninhabitable wasteland—a condition of desolation or destruction. Significantly, the other two passages where tohu and bohu are used together—Isaiah 34:11 and Jeremiah 4:23—indicate that such desolate states of ruin and devastation were brought about by sin.
Furthermore, scholars point out that the Hebrew hayah—translated “was” in Genesis 1:2—elsewhere can convey the idea of “became.” Later in Genesis, in the passage describing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, we read that Lot’s wife “became [hayah] a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:26). Certainly Lot had not married a pillar of salt; she had not always been so! Similarly, Genesis 1:2 could more appropriately be translated literally that “the earth became” a desolate waste—the Hebrew does not imply that it was created in that condition!
Great read!