We come to the matter of Satan's rebellion and corruption. That we should now study this subject may come as a surprise. We have been considering God's creation and suddenly we turn to Satan's rebellion. What does this mean? We must approach this matter with a sober mind in order that we may be crystal clear.
Many good Christians think that Genesis 1:1 is the subject of the first two chapters of Genesis. They were taught that these two chapters are a record of God's creation, and that chapter 1, verse 1 is the subject. But if verse 1 is the subject, how can verse 2 start with "and"? "And" means that something is going on already, and then something else happens to follow it. "And" is a conjunction which combines two things: the first thing goes and the second thing comes. Even the grammar shows that verse 1 is not the subject, but part of the description. It describes the first event in a series. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and..." This means that after God created, something happened.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth became waste and empty." The Concordant Version of Genesis translates the verse this way: "Yet the earth became a chaos and vacant." The Concordant Version does not say "and"; it says "yet." "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Yet the earth became a chaos and vacant." A chaos is a mess. The earth became a chaos—waste and vacant. If you build some apartments and no one dwells in them, they are vacant. We may render this phrase as either "a chaos and vacant" or "waste and empty." Something happened between verse 1 and verse 2 which caused the earth to become waste and empty.