An Exploration of Genesis, #3 - Let There Be Light
Genesis 1:3-5 – [3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
[4] And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
[5] And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
The first act of Creation was to create light. God spoke, and light came into existence. With an all-powerful God, it’s just that simple.
Amazingly, there are critics of the literal interpretation of Creation who point to this passage as a stumbling block for us literalists. They ask, usually in a smug tone that suggests this question devastates the literal view: “Where did the light come from, since there was no sun?” And some of them, like Rob Bell, are people who do claim to believe in an omnipotent God.
The answer is simple: I don’t know. But having no solid answer is no hindrance to believing it is true nevertheless. God created light without a defined source. As an all-powerful God, He can do that kind of thing. The light may have even radiated directly from Himself, as it will do when He brings the new Heaven and the new Earth into existence at the end of history.
Verse three also falls prey to the Word-Faith movement. Some popular televangelists have claimed that this verse demonstrates the power of words: Just as God spoke and Creation happened, we too can simply speak and things will happen or come into existence.
The faultiness of this is so obvious it’s painful to think anyone still listens to these particular “preachers.” The fact is not that there is power in words, but that there is power in God. God was the one doing the speaking, and thus there was light. No other being in the universe has that power, because no other being in the universe is God.
Wherever the light did come from, God assigned it a place to radiate out from, as it shined only on one side of the planet. Thus He separated light from darkness, calling the bright side of the planet Day and the dark side Night. The planet was apparently already rotating at something close to its present speed, because it experienced an evening and a morning just as we do today.
And here, too, we face yet another faulty attempt to make the Bible more “compatible” with evolution. Compromising and liberal Christians have pointed out that the word at the end of this verse is a Hebrew word that can mean three things: A standard calendar day, an era as in “America has seen its day,” or a totally undefined period of time.
So then, in an attempt to explain rocks that read as millions of years old, some have suggested that each “day” of Creation actually lasted for a vast and undefined amount of time. Therefore the six “days” in total could have lasted millions of years, they say.
But this is also easily proven false. In the rules of Hebrew syntax, when “morning and evening” and a specific number accompany the word “day,” the only possible understanding is that of a standard 24-hour period. Without exception, “the evening and the morning were the first day” can only mean a day, a single full rotation of the planet. Mankind is welcome to discount the verse entirely (to their peril), but there is only one possible meaning when the rules of Hebrew are applied. We will see the spiritual importance of this physical reality later in Genesis and again in Exodus.
A few years ago I came to the solid belief that everything God does in the physical universe is designed to reflect a spiritual truth. The planet and the things that happen upon it give our finite minds a look into some aspect of spiritual reality that we could not otherwise grasp. Despite having read this chapter a hundred times in my life, the thing that came to my attention for the first time while writing this devotional is the fact that God pronounces only the light to be “good.” He does not say the same thing for the darkness.
This historical event and physical reality reflect a spiritual truth for us to notice. We begin life stumbling around in the dark, spiritually. We cannot find our way, we grasp for anything that gives us stability. We are “void” spiritually.
Look at the world around us and how people are constantly grasping in this way. Numerous religions and offshoots, yoga, psychotherapy, money, material goods; really, the list is endless. Man wants certainty, stability, and fulfillment; and the rapid way in which our world moves from fad to fad seeking satisfaction should be a testimony to the emptiness (and danger) of groping in the dark for what we seek.
By contrast, God shines a light into that darkness, and those who are willing to turn to it will find that it is good, that walking by the light of God’s truth is a joy and comfort. Once accepted, God’s light gives stability, comfort, and certainty. It gives us direction on a daily basis and a long-term vision of our final destiny in eternity.
The Light is good indeed.
