Clough Genesis Lesson 5

“Let there be light” – Genesis 1:3-5

In our Genesis series we have covered most of the preparatory work; we have studied certain topics to introduce the verse by verse exegesis of the text. And hopefully all this preparation will pay off as we go through on a verse by verse basis and make certain claims that you will be able to see that these claims, in fact, originate from very well established principles. They’re not arbitrary; the Bible can be interpreted as easily as any other piece of literature. Now it’s the usual sidewalk expert who likes to argue that the Bible can be interpreted any way you please. I find it passively strange that the same kind of principles don’t apply in normal conversation for such a person. He would become very highly upset if you were to interpret his words any way you pleased any time he communicated. And any normal author, or even a person writing a normal letter, would be very highly upset if that same principle applied to those kinds of communications.

So it simply is not true that the Bible can be interpreted any way you please; not legitimately, there are certain well-established hermeneutics, an entire science by itself, a study of the principles or rules of interpreting literature. And one of the primary tools that has been most often overlooked, and I think really this is why we have so many sidewalk experts in our day that say this kind of thing, I think it goes back to the way most of us were taught English about fifteen or twenty years ago. When we got into an English literature class and the teacher said, well now what do you think the passage means? Well now Jane, what do you think the passage means; and John, what do you think the passage means. And after one hour of discussion about things some guy’s work that he put hours and hours into, and nobody does know what it means because we pooled all our ignorance among the people reading it.

The primary principle is you let the author interpret his own work; he would probably know what he intended to mean when he communicated it. So this is why in our hermeneutics, one very, very simple principle is you just go back to other things that the same man wrote and find out how he used the word; nothing hard, nothing difficult. So this usage of words applies, of course, to the ideas that he communicates and we’ve studied some of these ideas.

We’ve said, first, that the creation in the Scriptures is the basis of everything else. If we are off in the area of creation, necessarily we’re going to be off in every other area. Creation establishes the certain primary categories and we’ll see this come out with a vengeance today in the work of the first day, a day which most people don’t even dream forms the background for New Testament theology.

We have also studied Genesis 1:1-2, we’ve said that Genesis 1:1 is a comprehensive title that separates the Bible at once from all competitors. God is separate from His creation. He’s not part of it, He’s not intermingled with it, He is transcendent over it. The Creator/creature distinction is fundamental in all Christian theology, all Christian belief. You can’t go an inch in thinking as a Christian and living out your life as a Christian without making fundamental the distinction between Creator/creature.

We’ve also said that verse 2 depicts the universe as it originally was, not as a result of judgment. It’s the same thing as a small child building his stuff with the tinker toys and he first empties the box all over the living room rug and then after that he builds something. And so what we’ve got in verse 2 is the preliminary pile of tinker toys, the lumber at the construction site before it’s put into the form of a building.

We’ve also made the point that Genesis is a certain kind a textbook of science. Genesis is a certain kind of textbook of science in that Genesis, as history, presents data on real events that must be taken into account. If I’m a paleoclimatologist, for example, interested in studying the earth’s climates centuries ago and thousands of years ago and I fail to take into account eyewitness data from the Scriptures, such as the observation of ice and snow in Arabia in the book of Job, if I fail to take this climatological information into account in my theories of the past, then I am guilty of a willful rejection of the data at the very start of my investigation. So the Bible does provide data for scientific consideration but it does not go into all sorts of secondary explanations, or explanations of secondary causes.

The creation also gives us design, and we finished last time by pointing to the fact that over and over again, we’ll see this as we go through the sequence of days, over and over again the emphasis is on the complexity of the universe. Yes, you can say one little piece of the universe may have evolved by statistical chance; yes, one amino acid may have assembled itself; yes, we might have a small chain of protein, or yes, we may have a complex molecule on the lower end of the scale. And we could try to explain this on the basis of spontaneous self-assembly. But on the other hand when we’re dealing with the universe we’re dealing with systems, all of which require their parts to be simultaneously existing and functioning. So you have to have a whole system. One might say the right front piston in your automobile engine spontaneously evolved but that doesn’t give you an engine; you need a fueling system, you need an exhaust system, you need some sort of firing system, and all these systems must be in existence and functioning in order for the piston to do any good. So you see, one doesn’t really answer the question when he talks about a statistical self-assembly of certain pieces here and there. That’s not enough; what we must have is the entire system functioning and that’s what Genesis is telling us.

So today we begin a verse by verse approach beginning in Genesis 1:3. Already we’ve looked at verse 2 and since verse 2 prescribes the circumstances for the main verb in verse 3, we have to go back to verse 2 momentarily to find these circumstances. And in verse 2 we find three circumstantial clauses; if you read them over to yourself in your translation, whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll be able to spot those three circumstantial clauses. Those clauses describe the state of the creation prior to the act of Genesis 1:3. The first one is that “the earth was without form and void.” The second one is “darkness was upon the face of the deep.” And the third one, “the Spirit of God was moving,” it’s a participle, constant action, “the Spirit of God was moving upon the face of the waters.”

Now in this we have this pile of unassembled tinker toy parts and we’re looking at its features; one of the features if the formlessness. Now what verse 2 is telling us is that the universe does not have power of self-assembly. The universe does not have within itself the power to transform itself, to develop into something better and more complex. The universe, by itself, would be left in the state of verse 2 were it not for additional work on it from outside of itself, the creation work of God.

So in verse 2 the first thing we know is that shape and form and complexity are the result of God’s work. They cannot be explained, this upward development cannot be explained on the basis of forces inherent in nature; nature does not spontaneously develop itself. Later in the Genesis series we’ll deal with this in connection with the second law of thermodynamics and its implications. But right now we just simplify by saying that verse 2 describes the shapelessness, indicating that as a reminder to us all that the universe doesn’t attain to its beauty, design and symmetry by itself.

The second thing in verse 2 is that darkness lay upon the face of the deep. The darkness means a lack of energy, there’s nothing there. Now of course, when someone makes that remark someone will say ah, but it looks to me like in verse 2 all the water is in liquid form, what’s keeping it above the freezing point? Well, to ask the question means that you set up an answer and the answer that would normally come in response to that question would be based on the uniformity of natural law, that the various laws of physics and thermodynamics that apply today applied then, so we can take our laws, freezing point and so on, and move it backwards in time, back into the work of creation, and say that in fact the freezing point of water was 32 degrees then as it is now. But can we do this? The thing that we all forget is that while the acts of creation are going on, we have the creation of “natural law” too. And we’ll put “natural law” in quotes. We have the creation of “natural law” too. So we look on the shapelessness, we look upon darkness, and we look upon the Spirit’s moving. These are the three circumstantial clauses.

The Spirit is said here to move back and forth; this is an explanation or a warning of why it’s wrong to think in terms of “natural law” operating in the past. The Spirit of God is pictured under the idea of a bird fluttering over its nest. The word to “move” in verse two occurs only two other times in the Bible. The first place it occurs is Deuteronomy 32:11 and the second place it occurs is Jeremiah 23:9. In both those cases you’ll see a constancy of symbol in the sense that it’s a picture of the Holy Spirit as a bird with the wings go oscillating, or in Jeremiah 23 it’s not talking about the Spirit, it’s talking about something moving to and fro.

Henry Morris has said in one of his comments on the Genesis text that a modern word that would connote the proper meaning would be vibrate, or oscillate. And in this connection it’s interesting that many, many scientific phenomenon, at least in the area of physics, take the form of wave phenomena. For example, sound waves, light waves, in the atmosphere you have all sorts of waves of tremendously different wave lengths; storm systems are waves that move through the atmosphere, hurricanes develop out of what are called easterly waves in the tropics. So we have in science wave phenomena. And it’s interesting that the first time the Holy Spirit appears in the Bible He is promulgating this kind of oscillatory motion. We can’t infer much more than that except it’s an observation on the text.

This matter, then, of verse 2, all of these conditions describe the universe as it came originally from the hand of God, ex nihilo, out of nothing. When it got in this state we have this problem, and the non-Christian and Christians who are weak in this matter always want to take natural law and work it backwards. This is how various evolutionary schemes get started; that evolution assumes that natural laws operating today work backwards, they always worked. Now just a minute! One of the most profound statements on this was said by a physicist that works with Bob Jones University, George Mulfinger, who among the creationist scientists today I think is the most astute observer of stellar phenomena in cosmogony. Mulfinger said, in asking this question: “Where did the laws of physics come from? Is there a naturalistic explanation?” Now watch what he does. “Did the laws of physics evolve from simpler laws? Did the Stefan Boltzmann law,” which is a fourth power relationship, “evolve its way up the evolutionary ladder by gradual stages from the first power law? Did Coulomb’s law and the Newton’s law of gravitation,” one in electricity and one in gravitation, “reasoning from their remarkable similarity descend from a common ancestor.”

You see, people never raise this question. But if you want assume that the universe came into existence by the revolutionary process, why don’t you submit natural law to the same process. Why is it that natural law becomes deified and becomes, in an idolatrous way, a God-substitute? So that’s what’s happened; natural law has been capitalized, “Nature” is the subject of many verbs in our every day expression. Nature does this; Nature does that; Nature does something else. Well, introduce me some time; I’d like to meet her. In other words, what is this process we call nature. It’s a very scrappy way to talk. And it results in idolatry. Let’s take the essence of God, four of His attributes; omnipresence, omnipotence, immutable, eternal. These attributes are being accorded “Mother Nature,” she’s immutable, she never changes, the laws operational today were operational back then. She’s eternal because before the universe expanded it was contracted.

So what have we done? We have deified nature. The reason we do this and the reason all thinkers have to do this is because the Bible says we are all made in God’s image, and as creatures made in God’s image we have to worship God. But if we don’t want to worship the God of the Bible we still have to take His attributes and tack them on to something else, and what we tack them on to is not the Creator but the creature, and we have the rise of idolatry. And right here you have idolatry. “Natural law” assumes divinity, it is a God replacement showing once again you can never escape God, you’ve got to smuggle Him through the door with another label on or you’ve got to admit it’s the way the Scripture says, but one way or the other you will always start your system with a divine presupposition, either an idolatrous one or the real one. This is what most men do today, not thinking while they do it but nevertheless, they do it.

So we have the state of verse 2 and we must explain what happened. So God says in verse 3, a very famous first act of God, it’s described for us because remember verse 2, it’s not described in the Bible where verse 2 comes from, it’s just assumed it’s creation from nothing, implied in verse 1. But verse 3 describes in detail the first act of God in a creation way, “Let there be light,” a very famous expression, people are often using that in a facetious way. But it has a number of important processes.

The first thing about it is that it shows, unlike this idolatry where nature is doing something, instead of a impersonal process self-generating itself, what we’ve got is a personal volition involved. “Let there be light” is a verbal command from a person. And “Let there be light” implies that both natural law matter energy together are brought into existence by God. God’s sovereign word overlies and underlies and forms the basis of all natural phenomena, beginning with light and energy. Now we often use, even in Christian circles, “natural law,” and it’s convenient to describe things, we have various equations we like to use; one of the most famous in physics, an elementary one is F=MA, force equals mass times acceleration. And we think ourselves very profound when we write that equation because we can differentiate it and get all sorts of interesting things out of it; we can study momentum, we can study energy, and we can modify it in modern 20^th century physics and come up with all sorts of other things. There’s only one problem; after we’ve written our equations and described this, the question is, have we explained it. Do we really know what gravity is? Do we really know what electricity is? Do we really know what force is, what mass is? Now we describe these things but don’t be snowed by mathematics. Mathematics is a language that describes things for us; it enables us to work with things better, but it doesn’t, by itself, explain a thing. I could just as well put X, Y and Z into that formula, it wouldn’t make a particle of difference. It’s just a system of description.

Now let’s look at how the Bible authors consider what we call “natural law.” Turn to Psalm 33 because we want to get a biblical context. Then we’re going to look at three or four passages and we’re going to move slowly into the pages of the New Testament, and when we get into the pages of the New Testament we want to watch how the New Testament authors take very seriously the creation work of the first day. I do this only because there are those who think that one can be slippery and slidey in Genesis 1 and still be sound in the New Testament. Wrong! If you’re going to chuck Genesis 1 be honest and chuck the whole thing all the way into the New Testament because it all goes together, it hangs together or it falls together.

But first, before we get in the New Testament, let’s look at Psalm 33:6; here is a typical instance of the way the Bible authors view nature. Now notice, the Bible authors are well acquainted with natural processes but look how they talk about them. “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made and all of the host of them by the breath of His mouth. [7] He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap; He layeth up the depth in storehouses. [8] Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. [9] For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.” Obviously this author is saying that the Word of God precedes and is the primary cause of matter energy and natural law. F=MA is a product of the Word of God. So the Word of God stands prior to that kind of truth.

Let’s turn again because someone will say well, Psalm 33:6-9 is talking about creation, it’s not talking about every day processes, but I’ll be you when the Bible starts talking about every day processes it settles down and says it’s just natural law. Okay, Psalm 104, a very, very famous psalm on natural processes because it’s treating normal providence after the creation stopped and began to function in its usual way. Psalm 104 is a psalm of praise but in two particular verses, 29-30, you’ll see how the author views what we would call normal biological processes. Now the biologist would describe these things in his own way, maybe not as quantitative as the physicist or the chemist, but nevertheless, the biologist would try to get at least semi-quantitative about this, the processes of life and death, populations, the various groups of animals and plants in the kingdoms.

But look what Psalm 104:29-30 says, look how it describes it, “You hide Your face, and they are troubled; You take away their breath, and they die, and return to their dust.” He’s talking about animals. [30] You send forth Your Spirit, and they are created; and You renewed the face of the earth.” So when the authors of the Bible talk about what we call natural processes, they see God’s work in that process. So again, what do these formulas, the highly quantitative ones and maybe the less quantitative ones from sciences like biology and so on, what are these describing? We say, as Bible-believing Christians, that they must be describing the Word of God. The Word of God is expressed in truths that can be looked upon mathematically; the being of God is expressed in truths that can be worshiped musically; the plan of salvation can be revealed in ways that can be described verbally. God, in other words, reveals Himself through many different ways. The Word of God is the authoritative interpreter, of course. But that is not to deny general revelation, that God lets Himself and His essence be made known and men, His creatures, describe in response by music, by math, by various other languages.

Now so much for the way, then, the Bible describes nature. At least we can say this: that the Bible authors are not snowed by an immovable, static structure called “natural law.” They would call what you call natural law, what I call natural law, they would say that’s just regularity and how God works and the formulas you’re writing are just simply describing what He’s doing, except He always does it the same way for this period of history and so it looks like they’re constant. But what would you do if you were at the marriage feast in Cana? What would a chemist do who analyzed the water in the pots and got H2O and then after Christ does His thing and produces wine he gets all sorts or carbon atoms into the H and the O. Now we’ve got organic molecules of wine, where did they come from? Did they spontaneously self-assemble or did Jesus take a little box of Kool-Aid out of His pocket and dip it in the thing? What was this? No, it was the fact that as the Creator Jesus Christ could generate carbon atoms; it’s very simple, for Him. And He did it, and the proof of it was the people tasted it; much to the chagrin of some fundamentalists it was real wine because the guy that was at the head of the feast said this is vintage wine, it’s been around for a while, it tastes good.

Let’s come to the New Testament and watch how the New Testament authors use the work of the first day, creation of light. In John 1:1-5 the author of this Gospel begins with the same creation picture of Genesis. Now you’ve got to notice this because this shoots down the idea that you don’t have to learn anything about Genesis, you can just start ahead in reading the New Testament. If I have said this once I have said it a thousand times from this pulpit: you don’t start teaching people with Jesus stories. And we are most wrong in the way we teach children, we start them out telling them about just Jesus. The kid doesn’t understand who Jesus is, he can’t, he doesn’t have the equipment aboard. The place to start with children is with the attributes of God. I have said this and I have said this and I have said this and I have said this and I still have people in this congregation who try to pawn off Jesus stories on small children. Now I don’t know what it takes, people say that I’m very persuasive; well, I measure my persuasiveness by things like that and I come out with a big zero on that scale.

John 1:1-5, here is where Christ is explained in terms of the Creator of Genesis 1. Observe how it starts, “In the beginning,” exactly the same words as Genesis 1:1 except after that it shifts. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In the Greek these are imperfect tenses, which denote prior existence. Creation is visualized as a point in time and prior to that, God, the Logos, in the Greek, L-o-g-o-s, is what is translated as “the Word.” And this Logos coexisted with God before creation. The Logos, according to verse 14, “became flesh,” meaning that the Logos, Jesus Christ, is God and man in one person forever. But the interesting thing about verse 1 for our consideration in the Genesis series is that the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who together create, are said to create through the Second Person, the Logos. The word “logos” was used, by the time John wrote, for various concepts. The Greeks already had great dissertations on logos, on the order and structure of the universe, Philo of Alexandria, who was a Jewish philosopher, took this and tried to marry it with Judaism and we have a lot of development of this.

Well, John the apostle, probably around 70-80 AD now picks this word up and says this is a good word to denote the Second Person of the Trinity, that which gives form to the creation, that which gives rational order to the creation, that is the primary ministry of the Second of the Three Persons of the Trinity. So he calls the Second Person not “the Son,” but “the Logos.” And so “the Logos was God.” In verse 2 he repeats it, just to avoid the heresy of Arianism and other things that have come into the Church that argue that Christ was less than God.

John 1:3, “All things” now what is this talking about? Is this talking about salvation? No; this is talking about creation. You see, the Bible never even starts the Gospels without going back to creation; if you are weak in creation you are going to be weak everywhere else. “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.” It’s a claim to supreme creation; there can not be anything, angels, Michael, archangel or anything else that Jesus Christ personally did not create. He created all things, perfect tense at the end, that “anything that was made,” or has ever been made, was made through the Logos.

John 1:4, “In Him was life; and the life…now verses 4-5, as you read this think of the first day of creation because that’s where John’s getting the imagery from. Remember we just read in Genesis 1 that creation was dark, it was without form, it was just a watery mass, and what did we say happened? “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” God spoke into a dark passive disordered universe. Now here, notice the same picture, verses 4-5. “In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. [5] And the light now,” present tense, “keeps on shining in darkness; though the darkness has never hindered it,” or enveloped it, or comprehended it.

Now what is John getting at? He is picking up the Genesis 1 narrative that he knew his readers would be familiar with and he’s simply using it as a device to teach about Jesus Christ. He is saying that here we have the universe in its dark form and light comes in from outside; just as that universe was dark without the light, so he says men do not have life in and of themselves; all life that men has comes from outside of the universe, from God Himself. He says “the life was the light of men.” Now what do we mean by the light of men? Obviously it doesn’t mean physical light. Well, let’s look elsewhere in John’s Gospel, following the principle of hermeneutics, you just simply go to the author and if you’re patient enough and you’re persistent enough, the author will tell you what he means by his terms.

And we need not go any further than John 1:7-9 because that’s where the light comes up again. He says the prophets of the Bible, like John the Baptist, came “to bear witness of the Light, that all men through Him might believe.” But, verse 8, “He was not that Light,” in other words, no human prophet was ever the Light itself, they were only sent to bear witness of the Light. [9] “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man,” and here obviously it’s not talking about salvation; what it’s talking about is that all men have a conscience, whether they are Christian or whether they are not a Christian, it doesn’t make any difference, they’re still made in God’s image; they still have dignity, they still have value, and the value they have, their conscience, their sense of deity, is given to them by Jesus Christ, is given to them by the Logos. That’s the claim of an apostle; if you want to debate the claim okay, but let’s just listen to what he’s saying first, before we debate him. He is making the claim that the Light of all men, the moral, spiritual light they have they get by virtue of the Second Person of the Trinity. And so I say, we’re free to dispute the claim but we’re not free to make John’s word something [other] than John meant them to make. So we have the first part of the Gospel teaching what Jesus Christ does, that He supplies men with light; men are utterly and completely dependent upon Him helping them from the outside, like the dark, dank universe was dependent upon God’s outside word saying “Let there be light.”

The second passage in the New Testament that builds on the work of the first day is found in 2 Corinthians 4:6; in 2 Corinthians 4:6 we’ve got a direct quote from the work of that first day. What I’ll try to do in following Sunday mornings is every time we come to one of these days of creation I’ll try to lead you to a passage in the New Testament that quotes from that day because I want to prove to you that you can’t play fast and loose with Genesis 1 without paying a price in the New Testament text because the New Testament authors obviously believed the Old Testament.

In 2 Corinthians 4:6 we have a direct citation; it doesn’t look that way the way your King James translations are worded. It says in the King James translation, for example, “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” But a more literal translation would read: “Because God, the One who said, (quote) ‘Out of darkness let light shine,’ (end quote) this One has shined in our hearts…”

same as translation. The God who said, “Out of darkness let the light shine,” that God, is the One who has given us the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Paul, what do you mean? Now first of all he’s borrowing from Genesis 1:3, that’s very clear. And he’s obviously, therefore, saying that the works of God are where it’s at, not creation. Nature does not have within itself processes of transformation. And with this, now, surely someone ought to see an interesting relationship between evolution and creation on the one hand and salvation by works and grace on the other; they’re all tied together in this one verse. In the creation account it’s a polemic against the idea that nature has power within itself to generate itself. In other words, the creature is dependent on the Creator; the creature doesn’t create the creature, the Creator does.

All right, if that’s that over here in creation, what do you suppose is going to happen over here in redemption/salvation? Same thing? The creature doesn’t have it within himself to work his way up in some salvation by works schema. It doesn’t work because the creature is a creature. If there is ever going to be redemption and salvation it’s got to come from outside the creation and thus he borrows the imagery in Genesis 1:3, so in both cases, if you take an evolutionary idea that the creature makes the creature instead of the Creator, then logic would seem to say that you must transform New Testament theology to say that man saves himself, purely a natural process, maybe some psychological gimmicks thrown in along the way, self-hypnosis and a few other things, emotional pressure to create some sort of a pseudo conversion.

And I must say that in our own circles there are pseudo conversions, three’s a lot of it, this is why there’s a lot of pressure often times in groups, where Christians get together and they get one or two non-Christian in they grrrrr, descend upon them like dogs. What would you do if you were a non-Christian sitting here and all these Christians growling at you? Don’t you feel that would be a pressure? Of course. So you have to be careful; in a real evangelistic situation you cannot create social pressure on the non-Christian. You let him choose the way he wants to choose, otherwise you generate false conversion, then you are in a mess because you can’t tell now, is this really the Spirit of God working in this person or is this person just under a social compulsion to please his girlfriend, or please his wife, or please somebody else. What’s the gimmick and oftentimes there are these things.

So Paul says no, the salvation occurs when the same God who gave energy to the universe talks to your heart. Isn’t this an amazing statement, that all the force and power of the God who gave energy to the physical universe comes into the person and speaks? And what does He project into our hearts, the last part of 1 Corinthians 4:6, he projects “knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” Now what does it mean, “knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ? Well, he’s talking about the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ and what is the central conviction of the gospel? That God is incarnate where? In Jesus Christ! So what God does to the God-consciousness of a man made in His image is saying hey, you want to know Me? I’ll tell you where you can find Me. You know who I am, God says, because you’re My creature; by virtue of our creaturehood we know God. This is Paul’s central apologetic, don’t buy this stuff about people don’t know God. In the depths of their hearts all men know about God, or else they couldn’t be held accountable. So all men know of God’s existence and what has to happen at the point of salvation is that they realize where to meet God. And they meet Him “in the face of Jesus Christ.” God is identified in a one to one relationship, and that’s what verse 6 is talking about. Again, argue with Paul, I’m just telling you what Paul says. Paul says that in fact the Spirit of God does this and he insists on identifying God with Jesus Christ. It’s analogous to that first act of creation.

Let’s go back to Genesis 1, now having seen that it does carry implications from the New Testament, it’s a vehicle for explaining Christ, it’s a vehicle for explaining salvation. Evidently Paul and John both thought it quite literal or they would never have used it the way they did in their writings. After God says, in Genesis 1:3, “Let there be light,” immediately “there was light…” immediately there was light.” It shows you the inherent responsiveness of nature to God’s command. God doesn’t argue, hey, come on, get some light there, light I said… [Clough pounds on pulpit] you don’t see God saying that. There’s a quiet dignity of a sovereign power, “Let there be light,” no argument, and there’s automatically light.

Now God does a strange thing and this formula is repeated from day to day, we won’t go over this in ensuing Sundays with the other says, but you’ll see there’s the same literary formula. First, the command, then the obedience to the command, and then the appreciation of the command, “And God saw the light,” God looked at it, He considered it, and then the fourth thing is He evaluates it, “it’s good.”

Now oftentimes people have made a lot of this word “good” as it occurs, as though the darkness isn’t good and so on. Forgetting that in the Hebrew the word tob is also the word to mean beauty. Several places in the Old Testament, for example, when beautiful women occur and the author wants to draw attention to them they’ll she is tob, she’s beautiful. It doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s high ethically and spiritually, it’s just a description of physical beauty. And so what we’ve got here is that God saw the light, He enjoys the works of His hand and it pleases Him, He says that’s beautiful. The mess in verse 2 isn’t called beautiful because it’s not, it’s a mess. So you don’t find God calling it good because it isn’t. But light He does call good. Here we have the ordering, there may be some natural laws that have already been set in motion, we don’t know, but something’s happened here and God says there’s light.

Now let’s make a little application to personal living. If we are made in God’s image, you are made in God’s image, I am, we are creators; every day you live your creating a record, your own personal historical record. This may include things you’ve done for other people, it may include things you’ve done to other people, it may include craftsman type things or what have you. But what the Bible says is that within your soul as one made in God’s image there ought to be an appreciator also, so that when you spend time creating something, creating it well with skill, sit back and enjoy it. That’s not pride; that’s healthy enjoyment, and it’s part of your soul’s desire, it’s part of the appreciator of your soul, to back off and be pleased with what you’ve done. You see, in our own generation this is something that seems to have gone down the drain, the old-fashioned desire to produce quality work, the work of the craftsman.

When my father was working in World War II on some fire controls for the navy; he was designing a certain set of gears that had to be used aboard ship to keep the guns level while the ship rolled in the sea, or at least not to keep them level but to keep them so they couldn’t fire except when the target was at the right height. And to do this it involved this machinery, it was very mechanical in those days, a lot more than electronic today, a set of gears had to be cut. Well, gears are very difficult things for machinists to make, particularly when they get very beveled gears and so on, various combinations. And oftentimes there’s pitch problems and cutting problems and so on. But when they came up with this system they consulted with various manufacturers of gears. They said can you build us this gear, we need it. No, can’t do it, 500 reasons why it can’t be done. Well in this shop there was these two mechanics that had come from Germany right after World War I and they were older men, they were almost retired, they didn’t have a pressure on them in many ways and they just enjoyed to work with their hands and make something quality. So they said yeah, we’ll do it, and they did.

All the major gear manufacturers of American gave all sorts of reasons why this set of gears could never be machined, could never be done, you can draw a picture of it but you can never put that on a machine and cut it. These guys did. And so my father walked down there afterwards, after they’d produced the gears, and they said how come you guys, you know, when we have a problem like this you do it and everybody else gives us all these reasons why it can’t be done. And the guy’s explanation was simply this: if there’s a chance to create a new gear, I want to be the one that does it. Now there’s the difference in the attitude; he had pride in what he did. That’s not immoral and we’ve confused it; it is right to have pride in what you do. It is right to spend time developing your skills until you can be the very best in what you’re going and the result is you’re going to be very happy, because you’re going to get a happiness on the inside that comes from knowing that you’ve really produced something.

Do you know where that comes from? It’s your imagehood, that’s your Godhead operating; in a total (quote) “non-spiritual” area, that’s where you can see your imagehood f unction. And in our own generation why so many people are sad, so many people have no satisfaction of their work, it’s always the boss, it’s always higher wages or something else. No it isn’t, not really. What it is is that I’m not pleased with what I’m doing; I get no pleasure out of it. Why? There’s something wrong with what I’m doing or how I’m doing it.

Well, God got a lot of pleasure out of it and it’s expressed in that one four letter word, “good.” God enjoyed His creation. Oftentimes we don’t think of the fact that God is a happy God, that God has perfect happiness, He has perfect joy, and He enjoys what He does. You might even say, using modern psychological English, “God is a well-adjusted God.”

Then it says He “divided the light from the darkness,” separating it into day and night, and here we have the origin of “day” and why these days are literal days. The day/night separation is not a separation of just the qualities of light and darkness; it is a time alternation that is discussed here in the text. In other words, day and night alternate, that’s what the word “divide” means. He makes it periodically alternate, light, then darkness; light, then darkness; light, then darkness; light, then darkness. Why? Why is there alternation? You say, well, that’s a stupid question. No it isn’t, because in Revelation chapters 21-22 in the eternal universe there doesn’t appear to be an oscillation of light. In the eternal universe, the new heavens and the new earth, there is no need for sun or moon because the glory of God fills the universe. At least it fills the area around the New Jerusalem. And so there’s no need for light alternation.

Well then, why do we have light alternation, day, night, day, night, day, night, in this creation? To remind all creatures of something. What? Our dependency. Every twelve hours we are forced to reenact the death of the creation and its dependency, and what it would be like if God didn’t sustain it. In a small way, when you go to sleep at night you are saying something; you are admitting theologically that you’re a creature and that you go passive, lie flat, just as the creation in Genesis 1:2, in sort of a darkness until God says “Let there be light.” And it’s more powerful than that because if it wasn’t for the alternation of light a lot of other systems that are life supporting wouldn’t function properly. So we have God building within the creation itself a reminder of theology and doctrine. See, this answers the question about, “What about those who never heard the New Testament?” Have they ever gone to sleep at night? It’s part of general revelation.

All right, are these days literal days? Here’s why, there are three reasons why these have to be literal days, with all due apologies to Professor Martin and a few others.

The first reason is that whenever you have a unit of measurement in the Bible and it’s prefixed by a cardinal or ordinal number, that is, it’s put into accounting sequence, I say one cubit, two cubits, three cubits, five hundred cubits, I’m not talking about an imaginary flexible unit; I’m talking about a literal unit because that’s what I’m doing when I’m using it to measure. By definition measuring units when they’re used to measure are measuring units, a very simple definition. So when you have cubits, years, weeks, days, when these are put in a counting sequence, they always, everywhere else in the Bible… now I may be wrong but if I am I’ll gladly change, if you can show me one place in the Scriptures where there’s a counting sequence of measuring units that’s non-literal; it’s always referring to literal. And don’t worry about Daniel and the seventy sevens because the word “year” isn’t there, it’s weeks.

So therefore we’ve got that as a rule and I don’t know how you can get… [tape slips, some missing] say the Bible’s wrong than try to fudge your interpretation and squeeze one out of a rock when it isn’t there. There isn’t that much time available in the Scripture text. Counting units are always literal when used for counting.

Let’s turn to Exodus 20 for the second reason. In Exodus 20 we have a commentary by both authors of Genesis. In Exodus 20 we have the scene of the top of Mount Sinai and in this scene God gives the Ten Commandments and one of the Ten Commandments, which is the sign of the Mosaic Covenant, which was to be the lifestyle of the nation Israel, was that you work on a 48 hour week, they hadn’t heard of the modern 35 hour weeks yet, in that day was a 48 hour six day week. But look, look at the justification in Exodus 20:11, “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day,” now is that talking about literal days or long years. That’s talking about literal days in the context.

Well, this argument is so forceful that most people in our own time, the last decade or so, the conservatives who have felt kind of pinched and bent out of shape by all this have devised two new explanations to get around the problem. Instead of the old idea that these days were just ages the new explanation, one put out by Dr. Bernard Ramm, is that the six days were days on Mount Sinai when God revealed to Moses, like Sunday he went up and God revealed all that He did the first day; the second day Moses went up and he revealed all about atmosphere. [tape slips, some missing] He went up on top of Mount Sinai and God decided that day to tell him all about the earth, and so on and so on. So the days aren’t days of creation, they’re days of revelation. Now Dr. Ramm was forced to that position because the text is so hard-nosed about these literal days. The liberals who disbelieve the Bible, at least they’re honest when they read it and they say they’re literal days, I just buy it. Well, that’s fine, that’s a lot more honest than some evangelicals I know.

And then the second explanation that’s come out is an explanation that is used by Meredith Kline and that is that these days are simply categories. So on the first day of the week, Sunday, you’re supposed to think about light; on the second day of the week you’re supposed to think about water; on the third day of the week you’re supposed to think about something else, that’s the way it worked in the Old Testament.

There’s only one problem with both of those theories. If you look very carefully at verse 11 the verb is “made,” I don’t see it saying, “For in six days the Lord revealed creation.” It doesn’t say in six days think about it. It says “in six days the LORD made” it. So I find those two explanations unacceptable. So we’re back to the old classical Christian interpretation of literal days.

We’ve worked Genesis over this morning; let’s look at the application of all of this. Two points: (1) what does the non-Christian do with this, and then (2) what does the Lord Jesus Christ suggest we do with it? The non-Christian simply takes the data of Genesis and says ah, that’s not history, that’s just old Bible stories, we don’t buy that kind of stuff, this is 20^th century, people are different, flush it. So after we flush it what are we left with? Uniformitarian assumptions; we take present processes, here’s a time line and we move them backwards. We say this law goes like this, this law goes like this, so what we’ll do is we’ll move it backwards, it always did that, for millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions, billions of years, these laws held, just the way they’re holding today. We’ve got to assume that.

And so on the basis of that four major ideas have been created; there have been others but these are four of the major ones. In 1927 a Belgian Jesuit by the name of Lemaître came up with the primeval Adam hypothesis in which he suggested that all the neutrons of the universe were gathered together in a space equal to the radius of the earth, the radius of the earth’s orbit. And 13 minutes later, after this primeval Adam came into existence somehow, 13 minutes later it exploded, because this is the half life of the situation, and we had the expanding universe since then.

This was reworked by a most persuasive science writer, George Gamow in 1947 and came out with the Big Bang hypothesis in which he started with this glob of what he called y-l-e-m, ylem, just a word for whatever this compact glob was, that was one hundred trillion times the density of water; everything was packed tightly, you’ve never packed a Christmas package like this. It was all packed together and it started expanding, explosively expanding and it still is, the idea the universe is expanding, which, by the way, is not necessarily absolutely true.

In 1948 a third hypothesis came along by Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer who argued that the universe is continually being created in our own time, that matter is just appearing at various points. And this has been modified very severely so we can really say that Dr. Hoyle has forsaken this model. And finally, Alphin’s [sp?] endoplasma hypothesis when he wrote in The Journal of Physics.

So these are various models that are competing for our attention but without going into details we say this; all of them have the same problem and here it is: they all extrapolate present processes back under the dogma of uniformitarianism, or uniformity, unsubject to the Bible’s data, the Bible is all wrong, it doesn’t give us right, but then when they get back to some point, whether it’s Lemaître with his primeval Adam, whether it’s Gamow with his Big Bang, whether it’s Fred Hoyle and his problem of accounting for various energy relationships, [tape slips, words missing] but a catastrophe, not a miracle, by definition we can’t have miracles, so we’ll call them something else, catastrophes.

So isn’t this interesting; the very dogma that is used to deny the Bible, uniformitarianism, finally itself runs out of gas and has to be supplemented by its opposite, catastrophism, and there’s not been one model yet devised that has taken this assumption of uniformity of nature that is used to deny the Bible and something has made anything of it. It’s like Baal, the false god of the Old Testament. Remember what Elijah said, look, if Baal can do so many things, look baby, I’m sitting here waitin’ for him, let him perform; if you want a band we’ll get a band, if you want a dance, we’ll get a dance, if you want a sacrifice we’ll get a sacrifice but if your Baal is so great let’s see him do his stuff, do his thing. And Baal was silent, and so is the law of uniformity. It can’t produce the goods. Why? Because it starts out with a false assumption.

Let’s turn in conclusion to the New Testament, John 12. What do we do with it? So what “God said, Let there be light?” How does that help us spiritually? We’ve already hinted at it. Light and God speaking the light into existence testifies to our total dependency upon Him. In John 12:35-36, “Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you; for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not where he goes. [36] While ye have light, believe the light, that ye may be children of the light.” In other words, you’re finite creatures; you are finite creatures and you are limited! And you only have a certain amount of freedom, use it to respond to the Creator while you can. It always won’t be with you.