I have no full post on questions for you as of yet.  But verse 3 is a BIG DECLARATION for the I-15 Corridor.

Don’t you think that this verse might lean more in support of creation ex nihilo than to the doctrinal, fundamental  LDS idea of “eternally existing matter”?

F.F. Bruce has encouraged me to look outside the canon as well for fun.

2 Macc. 7:28 – where the mother of seven martyrs reminds her youngest son how God made the world “out of things that had no existence” (ek ouk onton)

2 Baruch 21:4 – “O thou . . . that hast fixed the firmament by the word, . . . that hast called from the beginning of the world that which did not yet exist”

2 Enoch 25:1-4 – “I commanded . . . that visible things should come down from invisible.”