And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
And God saw the light that it was good; and God divided between the light and the darkness.
God's first recorded act for our earth is not to clear away the dark. He speaks light into it. Then two things happen that shape everything after: God calls something good, and God draws a line.
(The writers below use an older translation. It reads "God saw the light, that it was good," and "divided" where the ESV has "separated.")
Light is good on day one, but the sun does not appear until the fourth day. That order is backwards by human reckoning. One writer treats it as a mark of where the account came from.
Now who but an inspired man would have so written? The lower your view of Israel — an unlettered people, even rough and uncivilised — the greater the wonder. Did Egypt teach this, or Babylon? Did Greece or Rome? How did Moses come to declare the fact as he writes it? ... Any living man, judging by what everyone can see, has always regarded the sun as the great source of light. If the writing had been his, he would have spoken first of that bright orb. In other words, the work of the fourth day would more reasonably have taken the place of the first. That is what the philosophers taught for ages afterwards. But the truth is not so.
Here God does more than make something. He looks at it and pronounces it good. That first moral verdict answers a darkness one writer traces back to angelic sin.
Darkness, no doubt through angelic sin, had entered His creation. As He moved with feeling over the scene, He commands, "Let there be light." This was creative power — the prerogative of God Himself. But it also says, "God saw the light, that it was good" — the first moral pronouncement of Scripture! "And God divided the light from the darkness."
God approves the light and says nothing over the darkness. So He never blends the two; He divides them. One commentator sees this happen inside a ruined life.
A wrecked life lies hopeless in a gloom that, as far as its own efforts go, must be eternal. Over that life the Spirit of God in brooding love flashes out the knowledge of the presence of God Himself: "God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts." The light here shows nothing but itself, in which God can find pleasure: "God saw the light that it was good." He can only divide it from all that is not light, calling the one "day" and the other "night."
The line God draws is absolute. One writer names what it rules out, and what it produced: the first day.
So God divided the light from the darkness. There was to be no compromise, no mixture, no vague twilight. For a season the darkness was to give way fully to light, and so there was a division between them. So there was evening and there was morning — a first day.
Darkness does us real good in the natural world. Scripture still never calls it good, and one writer explains why.
Earlier in this book we noticed that God called the light good, but said nothing like this of the darkness. In nature, darkness is a real benefit. After the toil of the day comes the rest and peace of night. But in a spiritual sense, Scripture treats darkness as a picture of evil. That is why Genesis 1:4 does not call it "good," as it calls the light good.
The same method appears when God starts work in a person. One writer also warns that nights still come.
God did not say, "Let darkness be removed," but "Let there be light." The positive radiance of light drives out the darkness. So too, the light of God entering someone's soul drives out his moral and spiritual darkness. "God saw the light, that it was good." ... Then God divided the light from the darkness. So we know there was light before God set the sun in its place to rule over the day. In a spiritual sense this reminds us that light has entered the soul of every believer. Even so, night experiences will still come, because the fleshly nature is still in us, and its very character is darkness.
- Light first. Light comes before the sun. No one writing from what he could see would have chosen that order, so the account reads as revealed, not reasoned.
- Light judged. "And God saw that the light was good" is the first moral pronouncement in the Bible. God's judgment enters Scripture the moment light does.
- Light alone approved. God calls the light good and says nothing of the darkness. He never approves it, so all He does is divide the light from it.
- Light unmixed. The division allows no compromise, no blend, no vague twilight — day and night are named apart.
- Light within. God treats a dark heart as He treated the dark earth. He does not say, "Let darkness be removed," but "Let there be light." Nights still come, because our fleshly nature remains.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning -- the first day.
Genesis 1:5 closes the first day of God's work: God names what He has just separated, and time starts to be counted. It also opens questions readers still argue over — where does a day begin, and how can there be evening and morning before the sun appears on day four?
Every act in this chapter is God's own.
All is divine. God said, God saw, God called. His thoughts, words, and acts are presented throughout. ... How noticeable it is, too, that God gives everything its name! He calls as well as makes all things. Night and day, heaven, earth, and seas all receive their names as well as their existence from Him. What was for man's use, and to be put under man's control, is left for him to name.
God kept some names for Himself and left others to the first man.
We have now had five things before us that were named by God Himself. We note this because of what comes next. In the next chapter God brings to Adam the living creatures He had made on the fifth and sixth days, so that he might give them names... So God let Adam show his powers of discernment in many a smaller detail. But these five things he had to accept as named by God — Day, Night, Heaven, Earth, Seas.
The order "evening... morning" sounds backwards to a modern reader.
Notice that the first day does not begin before the light, but with it. Otherwise it could not begin with evening, for evening implies light already there. But the light strangely comes only to fade and darken into night. Through that it reaches its morning by a kind of new birth, when (for that day, of course) the darkness is wholly past.
The deep darkness of verse 2 is not this evening. One writer notes that the thick darkness "did not count for time." God brings light, calls it day, and "then came the evening and the morning with the light again" (J. N. Darby).
Critics have long objected that this verse counts a day three days before God sets the sun in place.
For a long time unbelievers took great exception to this statement of verse 5, because the sun does not appear until the fourth day. But the sun is not the only source of light.
One writer answers with a question: "Think now, if I had been writing a book, would I ever have thought of creating a difficulty like this on purpose?" (J. N. Darby).
How long is a day in Genesis 1?
The question is raised whether the days of Genesis 1 are literal, or figurative — vast periods of time... For ourselves, we believe it is to be understood literally. The figurative sense does occur in Scripture — "man's day," "the day of salvation." But that sense is clearly a secondary one. The literal sense is the primary... The repetition of "the evening and the morning" fits the primary meaning, and would have very little meaning in the secondary sense. Further, in verse 16 the sun is made to rule the day and the moon to rule the night, and we do not see how the primary sense can be avoided.
This order reverses the way we speak of a human life.
If the Scriptures were uninspired, we would surely have reversed the order and written that the morning and the evening were the first day. Man's mind runs naturally to morning first and then evening. We speak of the morning of life, and of the evening of life. For man, darkness follows light.
One writer traces the pattern to its end.
Practically, the day is not all light; "evening and morning" make it up. Yet though darkness in itself is "night," it is worth noticing something. Once light has come in, it is never simple, absolute night any more, but "evening." There are always some rays of the day. And in God's order, evening surely gives way to morning... its promise of the perfect "day" is never realised until God's work is finished and His Sabbath is reached. Then indeed there is no more evening, or morning either, but "day," without mixture or decline.
The two names given here become a pattern used across the whole Bible.
Here we have the two great symbols so widely used throughout the Word. The presence of light makes the day; its absence makes the night. So it is in the history of souls. There are "the sons of light" and "the sons of darkness." This is a very marked and solemn distinction.
- Light first. The day does not begin in the dark. Evening only has meaning because light has already shone.
- Named by God. Day and Night are among five things man had to receive already named — God calls as well as makes.
- Then measured. The repeated "evening and morning" argues for a literal day. The figurative sense of "day" is secondary, built on that primary one.
- Evening, then morning. Man expects morning then evening. God writes evening then morning — darkness giving way to light.
- Ending in day. Once light has entered, it is never total night again, only evening. At God's rest comes day without decline.