Let there be light!
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.v3-5
God spoke, results happened. This is the whole thrust of the book, one couldn’t get further away from evolutionary aeons of time. Like the miracles of Jesus, they happened in an instant. But where did the light come from, when we are told that the sun was not made until the 4thday? It is obvious that the author would see that this was an anomaly; if this was a man-made text this surely would have been ironed out long-ago. So it makes us ask – where did this light come from until the 4thday. Clearly it must be from God! And this teaches us an important lesson. Wonderful though the sun is and we do depend upon it, there is a greater light than the natural light. That is the light from God. God is light. 1 Jhn. 1:5. Now the natural light from the sun sustains life upon the earth; but that life is mortal. The light that comes from God through the pages of His Word also sustains life – spiritual life. The important difference is that it can lead to immortal life. No amount of sunlight will achieve this! So how simply and yet profoundly, God is teaching this most fundamental of lessons, by showing there is a greater light than that of the sun.
This too would have significance to Israel in the wilderness. They were about to enter a land where pagans worshipped the sun as did the Egyptians, whose country they had left. Yet what folly when there is a greater light than the sun!
This light divided the light from the darkenss. It implies a rotating earth, spinning on its axis. With space travel we can appreciate that half the globe is in light, this picture shows what a dividing line it is, a fact that we do not really appreciate from the ground. What is so wonderful is that woven into this literal account are so many spiritual lessons. From God’s perspective things are either light or they are dark, they either honour God, or dishonour him. Man has difficulty in seeing this contrast. Also we note that – as the Jews continue to do today in Israel – the day starts in the evening. The phrase evening and morningdistinguish it as a 24 hour day. But note it began in the evening; dark was followed by light. Again we see a valuable lesson. We are born in darkness, in ignorance of God and His purpose and as we mature, we see the light and embrace it. So we see how fitting it was for God to do it this way round.
The other point to note is all the things that God names and compare them with what Adam names. There are so many things that man has no control over – these are the things that God names. There also are many things that man does have control over – these are the things that God left to Adam to name.
