In the first day of creation Light and darkness were separated and named “day and night” to mark the passing of the days, thus God created time! In the second day of creation you might notice that God created weather. By separating the waters below from the waters above he established a means of irrigation by either the waters on the earth or the waters above which would provide the moisture for all crops after the flood. There are those that argue that rain was an unknown before the flood, but that might not have to be the case. Regardless, either a mist came up from the earth to water it or there was water on the earth that watered it or it may have rained on the earth. Whatever, we have weather! Then the third day, Genesis 1:9 says, “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so.” So we have time in day one, weather in day two and the dry ground in day three which sets the stage for agriculture which is next.
This might even be supported by Genesis 8:22. After God opened the doors of his heavenly storehouse and poured out the rain for a year which brought the flood, he caused the waters to recede and then told Noah and his children, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” You see? Seedtime and harvest refers to agriculture. Cold and heat as well as summer and winter have to do with weather and finally, day and night is again the reference for time. These are prime elements for the existence of man. MacArthur writes, “Those first three days of creation were foundational. Each day is marked by a significant division that occurs. On day one, as we saw in the previous chapter, light was divided from darkness. On day two, a firmament divided the waters above the earth from the waters below. And on day three, the dry land was separated from the sea. All of this was necessary to make the earth habitable.”[1] God made it all for us! No other planet in the universe has what earth has and that’s because God made it for us to occupy. Isaiah 45:18 says as much: “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!): ‘I am the Lord, and there is no other.’”
Leupold asks a couple interesting questions about this verse. “Did depressions form and the waters rush down into them? We might think so. Or did elevations and mountains thrust themselves upward in the process of the congealing of the dry land and shed the waters as they rose?”[2] It could have been both. In Psalm 104:5-9 we see the writer praising God for the creation and the separation of the water from dry land. It reads, “He (God) set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.”
[1] MacArthur, John. 2001. The Battle for the Beginning: The Bible on Creation and the Fall of Adam. Nashville, TN: W Pub. Group.
[2] Leupold, H. C. 1942. Exposition of Genesis. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.