Genesis 1:7–8

And God made the expanse and sep­a­rated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. ⁸And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morn­ing, the sec­ond day. Eng­lish Stan­dard Version

In verse 6, ((Two months ago. Yikes!)) we read that God declared the liq­uid waters to be sep­a­rated from the gaseous waters. Verses 7 and 8 reflect what hap­pened after the declaration.

The Greeks called the sky Uranus — “Father Sky,” with Gaia as Mother Earth. Uranus was com­monly believed to be pri­mor­dial — the sky had no father, no mother… no creator.

In actu­al­ity, the sky was pur­posed and formed by Almighty Yah­weh, the One True God besides whom there is no other. In Hebrew, He called this expanse shamayim; its Greek equiv­a­lent is actu­ally oura­nos (“uranus”).

In just a few verses, the Scrip­tures describe the for­ma­tion of the sky. It wouldn’t take man long before the sky is wor­shiped rather than its Cre­ator. In Romans 1, Paul describes this role-reversal of serv­ing the cre­ated rather than the Cre­ator, and the Roman Chris­tians would cer­tainly be no strangers to this con­cept. The Romans too wor­shiped the sky much as the Greeks did, although they called it by the name Caelus.

A few thou­sand years after He cre­ated it, the sky is declared by the Psalmist to show forth the work­man­ship of God, declar­ing His glory (Psalm 19:1).

Go out­side. ((Do not pass go. Do not col­lect $200. Just go.)) Gaze up into the sky. What do you see? If you see the hand­i­work of God, if you get a keen sense of His glory, then you see rightly. If, on the other hand, you see the result of bil­lions of years of cos­mic evo­lu­tion, then I encour­age you to get alone with God, implor­ing Him to open your eyes to the truth of His Word. What Yah­weh has said has left no room to have it both ways; either He formed the sky on the sec­ond day of the cre­ative week or He did not. Either the sky declares the glory of God or it does not. My lots, as usual, are cast with the Almighty.

The prophet Daniel tells us that those of us who are wise — those who know the Lord and who shall awaken to ever­last­ing life in the end of days — shall shine like the bright­ness of the sky above (Daniel 12:3). Like the sky, we too reflect the glory of God; in eter­nity, we shall do so with­out fault, with­out blemish.

And that’s the sec­ond day, the cre­ation of what is some­times the­o­log­i­cally called the First Heaven, the Heaven near­est the earth, the sky, wherein clouds form, winds blow, and the birds soar. Oh, and it should be men­tioned that with­out the First Heaven, there’d be no air for us to breathe!