What did God create on the first day of creation?

The creation of light should fill us with wonder; and it is well to notice that it was called into existence before the great luminaries are mentioned.

First Day — Light. Science no longer smiles at the thought of light before the sun. The latest discoveries in this department confirm the simple, non-scientific, but not unscientific statement of our chapter. Light is the result of some unascertained motive power, producing vibrations of inconceivable rapidity in the ether which pervades the entire universe. At present, this is connected with the combustion going on in the sun, and indeed with any source of light, great or small. Back of this, however, science demands a further explanation somewhat in accord with that just given. What this mysterious force is which thus puts into motion the waves of ether, it does not say. Faith however, with these precious words before it, has no difficulty. God said: "Let there be light, and there was light." It is Omnipotence that manifests itself in the all-pervasive effulgence that floods His universe with this manifestation of Himself. "God is light." How grand the thought, how glorious, how divine! Brooding over a shapeless wreck that welters in impenetrable darkness, God manifests Himself!

We touch so closely here to the great spiritual truth of new birth, that the transition is easily made. Over a wrecked life, lying hopeless in gloom that so far as its own efforts are concerned must be eternal, the Spirit of God in brooding love flashes forth the knowledge of the presence of God Himself: "God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined 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."

Hence we may see how fitting it is that, as man is about to be introduced on the earth for the first time, as the previous state had nothing whatever to do with his being here below, and indeed was altogether unfit for his dwelling on it, besides the fact that he was not yet created, days should appear only when it was a question of making the heavens and the earth as they are. It will be found, if scripture be searched, that there is the most careful guard on this subject. If the Holy Spirit, as in Ex. 20:11, refers to heaven and earth made in six days, it always avoids the expression "creation." God made heaven and earth in six days: it is never said He created heaven and earth in six days. When it is no question of these, creating, making, and forming may be freely used, as in Isa. 45:18. The reason is plain when we look at Genesis 1. He created the heaven and earth at the beginning. Then another state of things is mentioned in verse 2, not for the heaven, but for the earth. "The earth was without form and void." The heavens were in no such state of chaos: the earth was. As to how, when, and why it was, there is silence. Others have spoken — spoken rashly and wrongly. The wisdom of the inspired writer's silence will be evident to a spiritual mind, and the more, the more it is reflected on. On the six days which follow I shall not dwell: the subject was before many of us not long ago.

But we have on the first day light, and a most remarkable fact it is (I may in passing just say) that the inspired historian should have named it. No one would have done so naturally. It is plain, had Moses merely formed a probable opinion as men do, that no one would have introduced the mention of light, apart from, and before all distinct notice of, the heavenly orbs. The sun, moon, and stars, would certainly have been first introduced, had man simply pursued the workings of his own mind, or those of observation and experience. The Spirit of God has acted quite otherwise. He, knowing the truth, could afford to state the truth as it is, leaving men to find out at another day the certainty of all He has said, and leaving them, alas! to their unbelief if they choose to despise or resist the word of God meanwhile. We might with interest pass through the account of the various days, and mark the wisdom of God in each; but I forbear to dwell on such details now, saying a word here and there on the goodness of God apparent throughout.

First of all (verse 3) light is caused to be or act. Next the day is reckoned from "the evening and the morning" — a statement of great importance for other parts of scripture, never forgotten by the Spirit of God, but almost invariably let slip by moderns; which forgetfulness has been a great source of the difficulties that have encumbered harmonies of the Gospels. It may be well to glance at it just to show the importance of heeding the word of God, and all His word. The reason why persons have found such perplexities, for instance, in relation to our Lord's, as compared with the Jews, taking the passover and with the crucifixion, is owing to their forgetting that the evening and the morning were the first day, the second day, or any other. Even scholars bring in their western notions from the familiar habit of counting the day from the morning to the evening. It is the same thing with the account of the resurrection. The difficulty could never arise had they seen and remembered what is stated in the very first chapter of Genesis, and the indelible habit graven thereby on the Jew.

The word "create" is used only three times. In the first verse it applies to the original creation, when God called everything into existence out of nothing. Then we find it in verse 21 in connection with the calling forth of living creatures (nephesh--soul) and in verse 27 in connection with man. The other word used is the word "made." This necessitates the existence of material which is shaped into something; the word "create" does not require existence of matter. The light which came forth on the first day was light before the sun, a fact well known to science.

First, God, as regards this scene of power, willed there should be light; it is not said bara (created) - it did not spring however from the earth - it was no produce of it - it shone when God commanded it to shine, God saw it - no man or eye else was there to see it.

NOTE. - It was night, and day for the earth. The dividing was now, whether the fiat of God for its existence was, I cannot now say - it may have been so. If light was made to shine perfectly on the earth - not twilight - evening necessarily came first.

The state of the heavens we have left behind us; we are conversant with the earth in a state of chaos. The spirit of God brooding on the face of the waters is formative power.

God commanded the light to shine out of darkness, "Let there be light"; it is not said that He made it now, but that where darkness was, there was now light.

Hence "creation" of light, first or second, in the universe is only the slip of philosophers. Scripture is more accurate than its most modern expounder, even when striving to show the accordance of science with the Bible. In the gloom that overhung the earth thrown into desolation God caused light to act, as the characteristic act of the "first day" of the week, the brief cycle that was to close with man its new master and representative of God here below. "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." It presents to us God pondering and speaking in gracious consideration of the race He was about to create thereon, with a mind dwelling on realities about to open out for man far more solemn than the light or the darkness, day or night, literally. Yet the light of the eyes rejoices the heart, says the Preacher (Prov. 15:30), and truly is sweet (Eccles. 11:7), as God pronounced it "good." "And it was evening, and it was morning, first (or, one) day." Only we must guard against taking the previous darkness as the evening. It would appear rather that light shone; and then its waning into night, and brightening into day, constituted the first day. That the earth would revolve on its axis, before the light-bearing of the sun afterwards, and so have the phenomena of evening and morning, is easy to apprehend. The fact is certain; the "how" was no difficulty to Him Who spoke and it was done. Our place is to honour Him in believing His word, without which faith nothing is as it should be. Another first day was to behold a better light; there, too, still more conspicuously, if that True Light shone when all was profounder darkness, He too had been before the darkness.

If the preceding exposition be just, the day of the first week is plainly one of twenty-four hours. No one can fairly deny that scripture, like other speech, uses "day" where required in a general or figurative sense, which may cover a period of considerable length. But this need never produce embarrassment to a careful reader: as ever, the context gives the clue. In this chapter and the next we have the word variously applied according to the exigency of the case; in none ought it to be doubtful. Here "the evening" and "the morning" should exclude just question. It can only mean, thus defined, a day of twenty-four hours. Before (not "there was a sun," but before) the sun was set to rule the day (of twelve hours) as now makes no difference as to the length meant. The same phrase is carefully used before and after. Nor would any prolonged sense have been tolerated for this carefully specified week but for the error which muddles "the beginning" with the first and following days, makes the heavens and the earth at first to be a chaos, and in so doing effaces in fact the creation of both the one and the other. For where is either really "created" on such a scheme?

This will appear still more convincingly when we come to close quarters with the six days viewed as embracing the immense ages of geology. It might not be so glaring when taken in a dreamy poetic way as a vision in the hands of the late Hugh Miller. But when the simple dignity of the true father of history is vindicated for the matchless prose of Moses, the effort to make the days, or some of them, answer to the ages of geologic formation in building up the crust of the globe proves itself in so much more glaring and violent failure. Take the first day as our first test: are we told to imagine such a notion as that the outshining of the light in dispelling the immediately antecedent darkness occupied an age? And if not for the first day, or the second, or the fourth, how harshly inconsistent to claim it for the third, fifth, and sixth? Especially as the seventh day, or sabbath, should honestly put to the rout any such application. In every case the figurative sense is here irrelevant and unsuitable. We shall see in due time from scripture that the stretching out of the sabbath into an aeon is altogether unfounded.

Now who but an inspired man would have so written? The more you depreciate Israel as an unlettered, if not rude and barbarous, people, the greater the wonder. Did Egypt so teach, or Babylon? did Greece or Rome? How came Moses to declare that the fact was as he writes? I do not speak of the sublime which Longinus so justly extolled, but of that which human experience never could have suggested; for living man, had he judged from universally known phenomena, had ever regarded the sun as the great source of light; so that if the writing had been his, he must naturally 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 the philosophers taught for ages afterwards. But not so the truth; and, whatever the seeming and striking difficulty, especially then, Moses was given to write the truth. As the apostle says some fifteen centuries after, God spoke light to shine out of darkness (2 Cor. 4:6). The darkness is not said to have been everywhere, but "on the face of the deep," and now that an earth for the human race was in question, there it was that God commanded light to shine. That it was "created" now is not said; that it had existed before during the geologic ages for varying phases of the earth and for a very long while for the vegetable and animal kingdoms, there is abundant reason to conclude. But this is science, not faith, though the scriptural account is the sole cosmogony that leaves room for it.

But what is affirmed is that (after utter confusion reigned over the earth and darkness on the face of the deep, yet the Spirit of God brooding on the face of the waters) God interposed and said, Light be; and light was. As far as the Adamic earth was concerned, the light-bearers were not yet set in their functions as now: this was the fourth-day work. The word was, "Light be;" and light was: language evidently consistent with that view of light which prevails in comparatively modern times against Sir I. Newton's theory of emanation from the sun. If the phenomena of light are allowed in general to be a result of molecular action, and dependent on fundamental qualities of matter as it is now constituted, so that it was not the creation of an element admitting of independent existence, as science now owns, is it not remarkable that the words of Moses avoid all error, without forestalling scientific discovery, and express nothing but truth in the clearest terms? At the word of God appeared instant activity of light, just before that time inert.

It has been thought by some that light was independent of the sun, that on the first day God created the light, and that on the fourth day He created the sun. But we are not told that on the fourth day He created the sun and the moon, but that He made two great lights. We believe that the sun and moon were created at the first, and were included in the statement that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. What proves this, we believe, is the statement that the evening and the morning were the first day, proving the diurnal motion of the earth, in relation to the sun, resulting in day and night.

NOTE. - "To divide"; day and night were already divided; this was a special ordering of the function of light as to the earth, in and by the lights.

It is a mark of revelation this to me, for no one inventing a plan would have separately formed light, and sun, and moon, at such an interval. This is order, not existence of light, nor forming, creating the bodies that bore the light.