Straight from

 New International

Encyclopedia

of Bible Words

(Thank you Diane, I was given it at the Highway 60 yard sale the same day I was given a slew of other books including The Mendenhall reference bible and John Crowder's, The new Mystics)

"CREATE

To many of us, the word generally implies an action by something that has not existed before is brought into being. The biblical words do not necessarily mean "to create out of nothing." But the key Hebrew and Creek words unquestionably teach the traditional Christian doctrine of creation

OT

1. The Hebrew words

2. The OT view of creation 

3. Genesis 1 and creation

NT

4. The Greek words 

5. Original creation

6. God's new creation

7. Summary

OT-1. 

The Hebrew words. A number of Hebrew words are used of fashioning, shaping, or making an object: the word bara, however, is distinctive. In the Qal stem it is used only of God's activity, thus making it a technical theological term. The emphasis in bara is not on making something from nothing but on initiating an object or project. There are certain things that only God is capable of initiating and thus of giving being

God's great acts of initiating indicated by bara include: (1) initiating the heaven and the earth and all natural phenomena; (2) initiating humanity, with male and female sharing the image of God: (3) initiating through forgiveness a cleansed heart; (4) initiating Israel as a distinct people; (5) initiating (in the future) new heavens, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem; and (6) initiating (within the flow of history) peace, the possibility of evil, the destroyer, and praise on the lips of mourners.

Bara occurs in the Qal stem, indicating actions that fall outside the realm of human competence, in the following Scripture passages: 

Ge 1:1,21,27; 

2:3; 

5:1-2; 

6:7; 

Nu 16:30; 

Dt 4:32; 

Ps 51:10; 

89:12,47; 

Ecc 12:1; 

Isa 4:5; 

40:26,28; 

41:20; 

42:5; 

43:1,7,15; 

45:7-8,12,18; 

54:16; 

57:19; 

65:17-18; 

Jer 31:22,  

Am 4:13: 

                            Mal 2:10  .                           

 

Keep all that in mind as we delve a lil further...

Excerpts and images from from;

The Big Bang no longer means what it used to

"From a pre-existing state, 

("The emphasis in bara is not on making something from nothing but on initiating an object or project.")

inflation predicts that a series of universes will be spawned as inflation continues, with each one being completely disconnected from every other one, separated by more inflating space. One of these "bubbles," where inflation ended, gave birth to our Universe some 13.8 billion years ago, where our entire visible Universe is just a tiny portion of that bubble's volume. Each individual bubble is disconnected from all of the others, and each place where inflation ends gives rise to its own hot Big Bang.

("The emphasis in bara is not on making something from nothing but on initiating an object or project."

Been sold on the multiverse for a long time:

Genesis 1:1 

The Creation

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.)

Back to the article

"Whenever we talk about the origin of our Universe, the term “the Big Bang” comes to mind, but our understanding of our cosmic origins have evolved tremendously since the idea that our Universe even had an origin, scientifically, was first put forth. Here’s how to resolve the confusion and bring you up to speed on what the Big Bang originally meant versus what it means today."

"He (Fred Hoyle) went on to deride the opposing notion as a “hypothesis that all matter of the universe was created in one Big Bang at a particular time in the remote past,” which he then called “irrational” and claimed to be “outside science.”

"Originally, the idea was that the Universe itself, not just the matter within it, had emerged from a state of non-being in the finite past. And that idea, as wild as it sounds, was an inevitable but difficult-to-accept consequence of the new theory of gravity put forth by Einstein back in 1915: General Relativity."

"With the introduction of Einsteinian relativity — the notion that observers in different frames of reference would all have their own unique, equally valid perspectives on what distances between objects were and how the passage of time worked — 

(From God's perspective to ours is 5.5 days lets say, he took a day off and there wasn't a sunrise till day 4, thank you Gerald Schroeder)

it was only almost immediate that the previously absolute concepts of “space” and “time” were woven together into a single fabric: spacetime. All objects in the Universe moved through this fabric, and the task for a novel theory of gravity would be to explain how not just masses, but all forms of energy, shaped this fabric that underpinned the Universe itself.

"Instead of an empty, blank, three-dimensional grid, putting a mass down causes what would have been ‘straight’ lines to instead become curved by a specific amount. In General Relativity, we treat space and time as continuous, but all forms of energy, including but not limited to mass, contribute to spacetime curvature. The deeper you are in a gravitational field, the more severely all three dimensions of your space is curved, and the more severe the phenomena of time dilation and gravitational redshift become.

"In 1922, Alexander Friedmann worked out, fully, the equations

(Math is the architect of the universe, man did not invent it and to this day he is finding out things through it, so where did math come from again?

 remember

"God's great acts of initiating indicated by bara include: (1) initiating the heaven and the earth and all natural phenomena;) math included, as it comes with the package, exist in nature etc)

 that governed a Universe that was isotropically (the same in all directions) and homogeneously (the same in all locations) filled with any type of matter, radiation, or other form of energy. He found that such a Universe would never remain static, not even in the presence of a cosmological constant,

(Einsteins error)

and that it must either expand or contract, dependent on the specifics of its initial conditions."

"In 1923, Edwin Hubble became the first to determine that the spiral nebulae in our skies were not contained within the Milky Way, but rather were located many times farther away than any of the objects that comprised our home galaxy. The spirals and ellipticals found throughout the Universe were, in fact, their own “island Universes,” now known as galaxies, and that moreover — as had previously been observed by Vesto Slipher — the vast majority of them appeared to be moving away from us at remarkably rapid speeds."

"In 1927, Georges Lemaître became the very first person to put these pieces of information together, recognizing that the Universe today is expanding, and that if things are getting farther apart and less dense today, then they must have been closer together and denser in the past. Extrapolating this back all the way to its logical conclusion, he deduced that the Universe must have expanded to its present state from a single point-of-origin, which he called either the “cosmic egg” or the “primeval atom.”

("The emphasis in bara is not on making something from nothing but on initiating an object or project.")

"This image shows Catholic priest and theoretical cosmologist Georges Lemaître at the Catholic University of Leuven, ca. 1933. Lemaître was among the first to conceptualize the Big Bang as the origin of our Universe within the framework of General Relativity, even though he didn’t use that name himself."

"This was the original notion of what would grow into the modern theory of the Big Bang: the idea that the Universe had a beginning, or a “day without yesterday.” It was not, however, generally accepted for some time."

(The universe had a beginning :-). No kidding really? In the beginning God created (initiated) the heavens and the earth :-)"

"Despite the resistance to his ideas, however, Lemaître would be vindicated by further observations of the Universe. Many more galaxies would have their distances and redshifts measured, leading to the overwhelming conclusion the Universe was and still is expanding, equally and uniformly in all directions on large cosmic scales. In the 1930s, Einstein conceded, referring to his introduction of the cosmological constant in an attempt to keep the Universe static as his “greatest blunder.”

"George Gamow...In a remarkable leap forward, he recognized that the Universe was not only full of matter, but also radiation, and that radiation evolved somewhat differently from matter in an expanding Universe. This would be of little consequence today, but in the early stages of the Universe, it mattered tremendously."

"Matter, Gamow realized, was made up of particles, and as the Universe expanded and the volume that these particles occupied increased, the number density of matter particles would drop in direct proportion to how the volume grew."

'But radiation, while also made up of a fixed number particles in the form of photons, had an additional property: the energy inherent to each photon is determined by the photon’s wavelength. As the Universe expands, the wavelength of each photon gets lengthened by the expansion, meaning that the amount of energy present in the form of radiation decreases faster than the amount of energy present in the form of matter in the expanding Universe."

"But in the past, when the Universe was smaller, the opposite would have been true. If we were to extrapolate backward in time, the Universe would have been in a hotter, denser, more radiation-dominated state. Gamow leveraged this fact to make three great, generic predictions about the young Universe.

At some point, the Universe’s radiation was hot enough so that every neutral atom would have been ionized by a quantum of radiation, and that this leftover bath of radiation should still persist today at only a few degrees above absolute zero.

At some even earlier point, it would have been too hot to even form stable atomic nuclei, and so an early stage of nuclear fusion should have occurred, where an initial mix of protons-and-neutrons should have fused together to create an initial set of atomic nuclei: an abundance of elements that predates the formation of atoms.

And finally, this means that there would be some point in the Universe’s history, after atoms had formed, where gravitation pulled this matter together into clumps, leading to the formation of stars and galaxies for the first time."

(With me so far? :-)

"These three major points, along with the already-observed expansion of the Universe, form what we know today as the four cornerstones of the Big Bang. Although one was still free to extrapolate the Universe back to an arbitrarily small, dense state — even to a singularity, if you’re daring enough to do so — that was no longer the part of the Big Bang theory that had any predictive power to it. Instead, it was the emergence of the Universe from a hot, dense state that led to our concrete predictions about the Universe."

"Over the 1960s and 1970s, as well as ever since, a combination of observational and theoretical advances unequivocally demonstrated the success of the Big Bang in describing our Universe and predicting its properties."

"The discovery of the cosmic microwave background and the subsequent measurement of its temperature and the blackbody nature of its spectrum eliminated alternative theories like the Steady State model."

"The measured abundances of the light elements throughout the Universe verified the predictions of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, while also demonstrating the need for fusion in stars to provide the heavy elements in our cosmos."

(Which is a whole different story in itself, the set of circumstances "for fusion in stars to provide the heavy elements" has to be amazingly precise, yet there is an abundance of "heavy elements in our cosmos." Purely accidental I'm sure. :-) 

"And the farther away we look in space, the less grown-up and evolved galaxies and stellar populations appear to be, while the largest-scale structures like galaxy groups and clusters are less rich and abundant the farther back we look."

"A visual history of the expanding Universe includes the hot, dense state known as the Big Bang and the growth and formation of structure subsequently. The full suite of data, including the observations of the light elements and the cosmic microwave background, leaves only the Big Bang as a valid explanation for all we see. As the Universe expands, it also cools, enabling ions, neutral atoms, and eventually molecules, gas clouds, stars, and finally galaxies to form. However, the Big Bang was not an explosion, and cosmic expansion is very different from that idea."

"...at the absolute earliest times, this picture breaks down. 

(Ecc 3:11 

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom the work that God has done from beginning to end.)

There was a new idea — proposed and developed in the 1980s — known as cosmological inflation, that made a slew of predictions that contrasted with those that arose from the idea of a singularity at the start of the hot Big Bang. 

("Cosmological inflation", Were not talking a different theory here, it's just a different part of the same whole as it were.)

"The first three were post-dictions of inflation; the latter four were predictions that had not yet been observed when they were made. On all of these accounts, the inflationary picture has succeeded in ways that the hot Big Bang, without inflation, has not."

(If you want to know what all seven predictions were you have the link to the article, I'm trying to make it make sense in a simple way believe it or not and those details aren't warranted for what I'm trying to do. The last statement about the inflationary picture is what you need to know.)

"During inflation, the Universe must have been devoid of matter-and-radiation and instead contained some sort of energy — whether inherent to space or as part of a field — that didn’t dilute as the Universe expanded. This means that inflationary expansion, unlike matter-and-radiation, didn’t follow a power law that leads back to a singularity but rather is exponential in character. One of the fascinating aspects about this is that something that increases exponentially, even if you extrapolate it back to arbitrarily early times, even to a time where t → -∞, it never reaches a singular beginning.

(Lets review step by step:

"and instead contained some sort of energy"

"God is spirit" (not physical) John 4:24)

"that didn’t dilute as the Universe expanded"

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." Hebrews 13:8.

"inflationary expansion, unlike matter-and-radiation, didn’t follow a power law."

Again, lets go back to:

"God's great acts of initiating indicated by bara include: (1) initiating the heaven and the earth and all natural phenomena

In order to not be affected by natural phenomena? God exist outside of them. God does not have to follow "a power law" he exist outside of them, he created them and thus he is not bound by them.)

"The original definition of the Big Bang has now changed, just as our understanding of the Universe has changed. If you’re still behind, that’s ok; the best time to catch up is always right now."

Agreed :-).

It just all matches up way to well if you ask me...Or even if you don't.

 Starman etc...

I love you baby.