Now here ‘s an issue to get your teeth into. Debate rages over it among Christians, both new and “old earthers”, with scientists and evolutionists joining the fray, each determined to prove others wrong.

At stake in the controversy is the Bible word FIRMAMENT. In English it means something firm and solid that has been specially made. The Hebrew word for it is raqiya meaning an expanse and something beaten or hammered out into a certain shape. But in Genesis 1:8 God calls it “heaven”.  And today there’s great confusion about whether the firmament is still with us and comprises the sky we see above or whether it was destroyed long ago. Even “young earth” proponents disagree on the issue.

For its part science chips in suggesting that if there ever was a firmament it’s what we see above our heads right now. Because, in their view, there is nothing new under the sun and, therefore, the heaven is now as it was millions of years ago.

For my money I believe we should let the Bible settle the issue. And if we do then a good principle to use as a benchmark in studying the Bible record of creation and the whole cosmos for that matter is WYSYWYG or ‘’What you see is what you get”.

You see, God SAW everything that He had made and, behold, it was very good (Genesis 1:21). He didn’t use supposedly scientific theories or stated physical laws to create everything; He simply saw things just as we do (WYSIWYG) and SAW that his creation then was all good. We should see it like that too.

So then, full notice should be taken of what God says in Genesis 1 about how and why He made the FIRMAMENT:

And God said Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament heaven, and the evening and the morning were the second day (Genesis 1:6-9).

Importantly, God created the firmament and everything else out of NOTHING, a fact science cannot and will not understand. Thus Hebrews 11:3 plainly says: “Through faith (we understand) that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen are were not made of things which do appear”.

So, the universe, sun, moon, earth and stars were all created ex-nihilo or “out of nothing” as the scholars say. God created all things by his faith in the words He spoke, so in no way did the “laws of science” or its questionable theories necessarily play any part in the process. Creation was (and still is) a miracle.

For example, if you are a scientist or an evolution-believing Christian, pray tell what natural processes resulted in Christ feeding 5,000 people with five loaves and three fishes. Again, how did Christ raise to life a man who had been dead for four days and was decomposing so fast that he stank? Not by anything medicine knows. No wonder science hasn’t even tried to come up with a materialistic answer to these two miracles.

But back to the FIRMAMENT.  In Genesis 7:11and 8:2 the firmament is pictured as the “windows of heaven” which were opened to unleash a flood of water on the earth. In other versions the “windows of the heaven” is translated as “the floodgates of the heavens (or sky)”.

According to the website Got Questions the “windows of heaven” depicts the earth as surrounded and enclosed by a solid vaulted, dome or tent-like structure. Like the “waters above” it may well have been made of ice. If that is so then its collapse would have cooled the earth forming the first ice age. Boffins say the huge downpour cannot have been just water for the thermal byproduct of prolonged days of rain would have cooked the earth.

In the flood the “fountains of the deep” were broken up. Thus, a flood erupted from below the earth while a similar torrent was unleashed from above. The flood drowned the earth for 150 days before God “stopped” the fountains of the deep and the “windows of heaven” so that the rain ceased.

So, what happened to the FIRMAMENT in all that? Short answer: it was destroyed. Again, if we take literally what scripture says we will see why. God is a God of “right division” (2 Timothy 2:15). He creates by division. In Genesis 1 He divides light from dark (vs. 4-5), makes a FIRMAMENT to divide the waters above from those below (vs. 6-7) then divides the resultant seas from dry land (vss. 9-10).

Now, dividing requires splitting a substance, in this case water, into two parts. How much water? Short answer: Enough to form the “deep” (Genesis 1:2). Simply put the Hebrew word means a deep abyss. Accordingly, the Apostle Peter defines the creation state in 2 Peter 3:5 as: “… by the word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of the water and in the water”.

So, how big was the “deep”? Well, big enough to swamp the earth and then some. Psalm 24:2 explains: “For He hath founded it (the earth) upon the seas and established upon the floods”.

Consider then how strong the FIRMAMENT had to be to hold back half the waters of the Flood unleashed in Genesis 7. And of what was it made? Derived from the Latin firmamentum (used in the 4^th century Vulgate) firmament means first a “firm object”, second a “rigid structure” from the earlier Greek word stereoma (from the Septuagint 200 BC), thirdly in Hebrew raqiya or raqia (not to be confused with shamayim, meaning the heavens and translated “the waters” in Genesis 1:6) meaning “to beat or spread out thinly”.

Wikipaedia states that the Hebrew lexicographers Brown, Driver and Briggs gloss the noun with "extended surface, (solid) expanse (as if beaten out)" and distinguish two main uses: 1. "(flat) expanse (as if of ice), as base, support", and 2. "the vault of heaven, or 'firmament,' regarded by Hebrews as solid and supporting 'waters' above it." A related noun, riqquaʿ  found in Numbers 16.38 refers to the process of hammering metal into sheets.

Word scholar Gerhard von Rad explains a word of the same root in Phoenician means "tin dish"). The meaning of the verb rq concerns the hammering of the vault of heaven into firmness (Isa. 42.5; Ps.136.6) where “stretching out” is the root idea. Thus, he says rāqīa means that which is firmly hammered, stamped (a word of the same root in Phoenician means "tin dish"!). The meaning of the verb Rs concerns the hammering of the vault of heaven into firmness (Isa. 42.5; Ps.136.6) where the root idea is “stretching out”. In other words, the firmament was a  metres thick sandwich of ice with an inner portion of hydrogen in near metallic form.

 And believe it or not, that has a connection to the hydrogen bomb project and experiments conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in America back in the Second World War. Indeed, the first confirmed formation of a metallic state of hydrogen was achieved  by scientists at Lawrence when metallic hydrogen was produced in a sample of fluid hydrogen, using a two-stage gas gun to create enormous shock pressure on a target containing liquid hydrogen cooled to 20K.

"Metallization of hydrogen has been the elusive Holy Grail in high-pressure physics for many years," said William Nellis, one of three Livermore researchers involved in the project. "This is a significant contribution to condensed matter physics, because pressure and temperature that actually produce metallization as has now been discovered."

So, the Bible had it right all along. Huge pressure and severely cold temperatures so sandwiched water that it turned hydrogen into spread out sheets of metallic form. Creation scientists pursuing this research postulate a “firmament” of compressed near metallic hydrogen in the middle of a solid water formation some eleven miles above earth.

Now in Daniel 12:3 we are told that “in the time of the end”, i.e. the pre-millennial kingdom of God, cited as the “Day of Christ” by Paul and brought in by the Lord’s appearing (see Titus 2:13), the resurrected “wise will shine as the firmament”. Simple observation shows there is no firmament to “shine” at present. But there will be in that blessed “day to come”.

Certainly, in the pre-Flood creation the firmament shone brightly. So brightly in fact that some maintain the shining firmament was the “lesser light” to rule the night as cited in Genesis 1:16. Certainly Genesis 1:14-19 makes no mention of the moon by name and only obliquely refers to the sun as “the greater light to rule the day”. No doubt God created both but only after creating the firmament.

In` verses 14-19 God plainly says: “Let there be lights IN THE FIRMAMENT to divide the light from the darkness, to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and the night and to be “for signs and seasons and for days and years”. So, when Adam looked up from the earth, he would have seen the sun and stars through the “lens” of the firmament.

The light ruling the day is of course the sun. And when the sun shone on the metallic hydrogen of the firmament it would be seen as a gentle pink glow, vivid at sunrise and sunset. At night there would be pink twilight as the warm glowing energy was transferred from one side of the earth to the other via the “fibre optics” of this huge canopy surrounding the earth.

According to creation scientists this pink glow meant the earth was never in total darkness and that plants and animals grew enormously under its beneficent light. Hence the dinosaurs and huge plants and trees of that time.

Clearly no firmament exists today. Indeed, in its absence we can see blue sky all the way to outer space. If the canopy of the firmament was in place this would be impossible. All we would see is a rose-tinted sky with the sun shining through in the day and a rosy glow at night.  Thus, the earth as God created it was never in total darkness. If you still believe the firmament is just the sky above, then pray tell where would the vast waters poured down in the Flood have come from if this solid canopy was not there to hold them back?

Fact is the Flood brought huge cosmic change. The benign pre-diluvian subtropical climate that had meant man could live naked in warmth year-round anywhere on earth was gone and the icy poles and the seasons of spring, summer, winter and fall took its place. Crops no longer grew year-round but only at certain times.

But I hear you say, doesn’t David in Psalm 19 use the present tense to say the “heavens declare the glory of God and firmament sheweth his handiwork”. Yes, he does but that doesn’t mean the firmament is actually still there above us. We should remember that Hebrew prophets often spoke of things yet to happen as though they had already occurred. This because they were so sure that what God had promised He would perform.

Thus Psalm 19 anticipates the huge return to things as they were created before the Flood that will occur when the Lord Jesus Christ “appears” from heaven (Titus 2:13) to bring in his kingdom rule over earth (2 Timothy 4:1). Acts 3:20-21 spells out just what God (the Lord Jesus Christ) will do in this astonishing age of restoration:

And He shall send Jesus Christ to you which before was preached (proclaimed by the prophets) unto you. Whom the heaven must receive until the TIME OF RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS which God hath spoke by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.

And if the Bible is to be believed then the list of ALL THINGS to be restored includes first and foremost the FIRMAMENT.

John Dudley Aldworth

Email: johndaldworth42@gmail.com

Website: https://www.dayofchristmnistries.com