We have to account for a passage in Psalm 18 where the Bible tells us that God is in both 1) thick darkness and 2) has brightness before Him, at the same time and in the same context.
Brightness Before and Darkness Under
The Foundations of Heaven
Knowing how the firmament is constructed lets us interpret scripture and account for empirical observations of the cosmos, including 90% of the mass of the universe that mainstream science (SciPop) can't find.
Riding the Heavens
God and the heavenly host may visit the Earth on a section of the firmament, described in Exodus 24:10 as a paved work of sapphire stone. This gives us a Biblical basis for the Silver Surfer.
The Brightness of the Firmament
The creation of gravity and formation of the firmament was to establish a place, heaven, where God would dwell in perpetual light because the firmament is bright like the sun, as we see from Daniel.
The Star of Bethlehem
As far-fetched as it may seem that the angelic host visited Bethlehem on the night of Jesus birth riding on a section of the brightly shining crystalline firmament, we shouldn't be surprised.
April 2nd
The firmament accounts for our empirical observations of the cosmos, it’s the “missing” 90% of the mass of the universe. We propose a mechanism for how the inner surface was blackened at the beginning of the fourth day.