《Coffman Commentaries on the Bible – Genesis (Vol. 1)》(James B. Coffman)
Commentator
James Burton Coffman was a prolific author, preacher, teacher and leader among churches of Christ in the 20th century.
He was born May 24, 1905, in Taylor County to pioneer West Texans "so far out in the country it took two days to go to town and back." He became a Christian in 1923.
In Texas, Coffman graduated from Abilene High School and enrolled in Abilene Christian College (now University), graduating in 1927 with a B.A. in history and music.
After earning his degree, Coffman served as a high school principal for two years in Callahan County, then taught history and English at Abilene High School.
In 1930, he was offered a position as associate minister and song leader in Wichita Falls, the beginning of his career as a minister. Then, he married Thelma "Sissy" Bradford in 1931. Coffman preached for congregations in Texas; Oklahoma; Washington, D.C.; and New York City. In his lifetime, Coffman received 3 honorary doctorates.
While in Washington, he was offered the opportunity to serve as guest chaplain for the U.S. Armed Forces in Japan and Korea and served 90 days, holding Gospel meetings throughout both countries.
Coffman conducted hundreds of gospel meetings throughout the U.S. and, at one count, baptized more than 3,000 souls.
Retiring in 1971, he returned to Houston. One of his most notable accomplishments was writing a 37-volume commentary of the entire Bible, verse by verse, which was finished in 1992. This commentary is being sold all over the world. Many people consider the Coffman series to be one of the finest modern, conservative commentary sets written.
Coffman's conservative interpretations affirm the inerrancy of the Bible and clearly point readers toward Scripture as the final basis for Christian belief and practice. This series was written with the thorough care of a research scholar, yet it is easy to read. The series includes every book of the Old and New Testaments.
After being married to Sissy for 64 years, she passed away. Coffman then married June Bristow Coffman. James Burton Coffman died on Friday, June 30, 2006, at the age of 101.
01 Chapter 1
Verse 1
This marvelous chapter is not history, for it provides information concerning events that antedate all history. It is not myth, because it carries within it a credibility that never belonged to any myth. It is not science, because it deals with the BEGINNING, which no science has ever even attempted to describe. It is INSPIRATION, a revelation from Almighty God Himself; and the highest and best intelligence of all ages has so received and accepted it.
For the preposterous and irresponsible fulminations of critical enemies of the Bible, and their utter futility and incompetence to cast any believable shadow upon the sacred truth here revealed, reference is made to the Introduction to Genesis elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that this chapter contains and presents to human intelligence the ONLY believable account of creation ever to receive the serious attention of thoughtful minds.
In this series of commentaries, we are concerned with what the Bible says, because it is the Word of God; and, a single syllable of it outweighs all of the vain speculations of unbelieving and sinful men. If one would know the truth of how our universe began, and of the origin and responsibility of human life upon our planet, let him read it here. He will certainly not find it anywhere else!
THE FIRST DAY
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
There is absolutely nothing either unreasonable or hard to understand about this. That there was indeed a beginning of our universe and the world we live in is absolutely certain. No matter how far back into the mists of prehistoric time men may postulate the point of origin for our universe, it is precisely THERE that they must confront God, the omnipotent, eternal, all-pervading, omniscient First Cause, known to Christians as the God of the Bible.
For example, if some theory regarding how our galaxy (the universe) began from the explosion of a dense star, should be received as true, then how did the dense star begin? The only intelligent answer to questions of this type appears in this verse.
"In the beginning ..." This says nothing at all of when the beginning occurred, but declares emphatically that there was indeed a beginning, a fact which no reputable science on earth has ever denied. The source of that beginning was in the will and the power of the Eternal God. It was not merely a beginning of life, or of material things, but a beginning of ALL THINGS.
"God created ..." The word for "God" here is "[~'Elohiym]," a plural term, and by far the most frequent designation of the Supreme Being in the O.T., being used almost 2,000 times.[1] Despite the plurality of this name, it is connected with verbs and adjectives in the singular. Thus, in the very first verse of the Bible there would appear to be embedded embryonically in the very name of God Himself a suggestion: (1) of the Trinitarian conception more fully revealed in the N.T., and (2) also a witness of the unity of the Godhead. Some have questioned this, of course; but we have never encountered any other adequate explanation of it.
"The heavens ..." There are three heavens visible in the Word of God, these being: (1) the earth's atmosphere, where "birds of the heaven" fly (Jeremiah 15:3); (2) the heaven of the galaxies and constellations (Isaiah 13:10); and (3) the heaven where God dwells (Psalms 11:4). The heavens here include the first two and perhaps others of which we do not know.
"And the earth ..." If our understanding of "the heavens" is correct, the earth and all the planets would have to be included also, but the singling out of the earth and its specific designation here would indicate God's special creation of it to be the repository of all life, and of human life particularly. That such a special creation of the earth did indeed occur appears to be absolutely certain, as attested by the utter failure of man to discover any evidence whatever of life anywhere else except upon earth.
Many learned men have written extensively concerning the multitude of physical and environmental factors which appear to be absolutely unique, found upon earth alone, the sum total of which supports and sustains life on our planet. The gravitational influence of the moon, the exact composition of atmospheric gases, the atypical behavior of water when it freezes, the atmospheric mantle of protection, the exact inclination of the earth upon the plane of its orbit giving the seasons, the exact distance of the earth from the sun, etc., etc. - these and literally hundreds of other peculiar and necessary factors come together to make life possible on earth. And, from this, it is mandatory to conclude that the special mention of "the earth" in this verse indicates the special creation of that essential environment without which life would be impossible, as is the case, apparently, everywhere else in the sidereal universe.
Verse 2
"And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the waters: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
"And the earth was waste and void ..." This refers to the state of the earth in the first phase of its creation, and it is also an apt description of the other planets as they are observed to continue in our solar system to the present time. Mars, Venus, Mercury, etc. are still waste and void. It is not necessary to postulate billions of years between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 in order to help God find the time to do all that He did for our earth. It is true, of course, that no revelation has been given with reference to the time-lag between these verses; but men's imagining that billions or trillions of years elapsed here or there does nothing to diminish the mysterious miracle visible in Genesis. If it should be supposed that God launched a waste and void earth upon a journey that required billions of years to accomplish His wise designs, then, God's power in doing a thing like that is one and the same thing as His ability to have spoken the perfect and completed earth into existence instantaneously.
"And darkness was upon the face of the deep ..." This is a reference to the state of the earth when it was waste and void. The melancholy waste of the mighty seas; and it is not necessary to understand this as a reference to the molten, superheated earth, in which metals, earth and all elements, with the abundant waters might be referred to collectively as "the deep." In such a condition all waters would have been driven into the earth's atmosphere. The big thing that appears in this verse is the abundant water supply, one of the principle prerequisites of life in any form. This water supply was evidently part of the special creation benefiting our earth, making the passage a further detail of God's creating the earth (Genesis 1:1).
"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters ..." Significantly, the Third Person of the Godhead appears here alongside God Himself. Whitelaw assures us that the term for "moved" actually means "brooded" as in the older versions; and it means "to be tremulous with love."[2] The Spirit here is the Blessed Holy Spirit, concerning whom much more information appears in the N.T. The primeval chaos that characterized this early phase of our planet is most significant. The complex, systematic order that characterized it later could never have evolved from chaos. Without the fiat of Almighty God, the unaided chaos would have become more and more chaotic. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is absolutely irreversible. Only creation could have changed chaos into order and symmetry. God made all things "ex nihilo."
Verse 3
"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."
"And God said ..." The language here indicates that the stupendous acts of Creation were performed by fiat. God spoke the word, and it was done. Could any process of creating light gradually even be imagined? Any chain of events leading to the development of light is inconceivable, the very thought of such a thing being rejected by the intelligence. Primeval darkness demands just the fiat revealed in this verse as the only possible solution for it.
Verse 4
"And God saw the light that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."
"And God saw the light that it was good." The intelligence of the Supreme Being, His concern with and His interest in the affairs of His creation, and His personal preference for that which is "good" appear as legitimate deductions from what is revealed here. It seems highly improbable that the creation of light merely means the making of light visible upon the earth. The text does not state that God made light visible, but that He created it.
"And God divided the light from the darkness ..." This statement is enigmatical, and that should not surprise us. It was inevitable that in the creation of all things there were countless facts about it that were incapable of being revealed to the finite intelligence of mortal man. God's dividing the light from the darkness simply indicates a time previously when they were mingled; and there is no rational understanding on the part of men with reference to that prior state of mingled darkness and light. The very presence of light dispels darkness. The diurnal revolution of the earth, excluding the sun's light at night, is usually cited as the explanation of this; but we reject such an explanation, preferring to view it as something beyond the ability of men to understand it. Besides, the relationship between sun, moon, and the earth did not appear until the fourth day, and this is the first day.
Verse 5
"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day."
Although this verse appears to mean that the separation of light and darkness was the same as creating Day and Night, this meaning is not consistent with the appearance of the sun and moon on the fourth day. It is likely that light and darkness in some cosmic sense were divided on the first day.
"And there was evening and there was morning, one day ..." This is generally hailed as requiring that the days of Genesis 1 be understood strictly as twenty-four hour periods of time, answering in every way to our days of the week in an ordinary sense, but tremendous words of caution against such a view are thundered from the pages of inspiration. The very basis for calculating days and nights did not appear in this narrative until the fourth day; and that forbids any dogmatic restriction based upon our methods of calculating days and nights. It certainly did not require any twenty-four hours for God to say, "Let there be light", and our understanding that God's creation was by fiat, that He spoke the worlds into existence, and that all things appeared instantly upon the Divine word, forbid any notion that Almighty God required a time budget in any of His creative acts. Certainly, we reject any view that puts God to work for uncounted billions of years in the production of that creation which is now visible to man. We find no fault whatever with the view that the "days" here were indeed very brief periods such as our days. For ages, devout souls have taken exactly that view of them; and no one can prove that they were wrong.
However, "days" are surely mentioned here; and before deciding that we know exactly the duration of them, there is a point of wisdom in remembering that God has revealed some things in the Bible which shed a great deal of light upon this very question:
"But forget not this one thing, beloved, that ONE DAY is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as ONE DAY" (2 Peter 3:8). For a thousand years in thy sight are but as YESTERDAY when it is past, and as a watch in the night (Psalms 90:4). The apostle Paul referred to the entire present dispensation of the grace of God as "the DAY of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2).
There is also another N.T. passage in Hebrews 4:4-6ff:
"For he hath said somewhere of the seventh day on this wise, God rested on the seventh day ... seeing therefore that it remaineth that some should enter thereinto ... let us therefore give diligence to enter into that rest (Hebrews 4:4,6,11).
Without any doubt whatever, the last of the passage cited above denominates all of the period of time following the sixth day of creation and reaching all the way to the final Judgment as "the seventh day." When it is considered that the very same day mentioned here in Genesis and called here the "seventh day," using the very same word for "day" as was used for the other six days, there appears to be imposed upon us the utmost restraints and caution with reference to any dogmatic postulations about exactly HOW LONG any of those days was. The Bishop of Edinburgh's comment on the above passage from Hebrews is an emphatic statement of what this writer believes the passage means: "From this argument, we must conclude that the seventh day of God's rest, which followed the six days of His work of creation, is not yet completed."
(1) Some see it as the Hebrew method of reckoning days from sunset to sunset, concluding therefore that these were ordinary twenty-four hour days.
(2) Cotterill, just quoted, saw their meaning as an implication, that "each day had its beginning and its close."[4]
(3) Others connect the words with progression from darkness to light, a movement upward to higher and higher forms of life in the cycle of creation.
(4) A number have viewed this as a reference to "the day" the inspired writer, Moses, was given the vision of God's days of creation, corresponding somewhat to the successive visions of Revelation.
"One day ..." Significantly, the entire six days of creation are spoken of as a SINGLE DAY in Genesis 2:4, "In the day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven." There are serious objections to receiving any of the "explanations" mentioned above. Any basis for dogmatic assurance concerning exactly what is meant by the days of this chapter has eluded us; and we therefore leave it as one of the "secret things which belong unto Jehovah our God" (Deuteronomy 29:29). There is certainly no impediment to a childlike acceptance of the days of Genesis as ordinary days in exactly the same manner that the first generation to receive this revelation in all probability accepted them, as most of our parents understood them, and as every soul humbled by a consciousness of the phenomenal ignorance of mankind may also find joy in believing and accepting them, fully aware, of course, that there may be, indeed must be, oceans of truth concerning what is revealed here that men shall never know until we see our Savior face to face.