Angels Ex Nihilo

In our first session of 2006, Peter Smith astutely asked if angels existed "before the beginning" of Gen 1.1. After all, as Rus Sleeger noted to me in an e-mail, "the angels shouted for joy" when God laid the cornerstone of the earth's foundation (Job 38.4-6).

However, Gen. 1.1 is a merism (or merismus), "a rhetorical device that refers to the extreme parts ... of something to represent the whole." (Copan and Craig in Creation Out of Nothing, Baker, 2004.) For example, the common expression 'from Dan to Beersheba,' in passages like Judges 20.1, is a merism indicating the entirety of Israel by reference to the nation's northern and southern boundaries. In Genesis 1:1, the author is likewise telling us -- by reference to creation's two extremes -- that God made the entire universe. This is how Christianity has historically understood Gen 1.1, as stating that God created the totality of everything. This first verse of the Bible "is an independent sentence that constitutes a formal introduction to the entire section, and expresses at the outset, with majestic brevity, the main thought of the section..." (Cassuto, quoted in ibid.) In other words, Gen 1.1 does not say that God's first two steps in creation were to make the heavens and then the earth, but rather it summarizes the narrative to follow by saying that "In the beginning, God made everything." The rest of Gen 1 details the actual formation of entities from the primordial, formless matter that God made ex nihilo in creation's first moment.

Please note that the merism, "heavens and earth," includes in its expression of totality all spiritual entities as well as material ones. The Scriptures never propose two creations, as though there were first a creation of spiritual beings and then a subsequent creation of the material universe. On the contrary, passages like Col 1.16 emphasize the totality of the Creation Event as including "things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible..."

So, by definition, if "the beginning" of Gen 1.1 is the point at which, or after which, all created things came into existence, then as created beings the angels (Psa 148.2-5) could not have existed before "the beginning."

Nevertheless, I agree with Rus that the angels were created before the planet earth was formed. Students of the Bible have generally believed that the angels were created on the first day, immediately after the creation of the heavens. It is logical that angels were not created until God made "the heavens" for them to inhabit (see Col 1.16; Neh 9.6). However, since Gen 1.1 is an introductory, summary statement, it is possible to interpret verses 6-8 as describing the actual formation of "heaven" (the angelic habitation) along with "heaven" (the earth's sky) on the second day; note that the text speaks of "heavens" plural (cf. 2Co 12.2). What seems certain though, is that the angels were created before the third day when God gathered the waters under the firmament and shaped the planet of land and seas that we inhabit. I understand "the earth's foundation" mentioned in Job 38.4-6 as probabloccurringng on this third day.