What happened on each of the six days of creation?

Verse 2 opens the six days' work. We commonly but incorrectly speak of them as the six days of creation. Exodus 20:11 says: "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth." The main work of those days was the fashioning anew of the earth and solar system that there might be a suitable abode for the man He was about to create. Beginning with the production of light, we travel up through the ranks of visible things to man, in whom rule and dominion was vested. The order observed in the account — vegetation, then trees, then fishes, birds, cattle, and creeping things, etc. — is such that no exception can be taken to it.

Light is the result of some unascertained motive power, producing vibrations of inconceivable rapidity in the ether which pervades the entire universe... 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 brightness 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 in impenetrable darkness, God manifests Himself!

On the second day a "firmament," or "expanse," was called into being. As a result of this a further division took place; not now of light from darkness but of waters from waters. God called this expanse, Heaven... There it is that immense quantities of water float above in the form of clouds, divided from the far greater quantities that lie on the earth beneath. As the result of the work of the second day the earth was surrounded with an atmosphere.

Again we find, as that which occupies the third day, that the waters under the heaven are gathered together to one place, and the dry land appears. "And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas." And then the earth is made to bring forth grass — that lovely array, as it were, for the earth — full of beauty as well as usefulness.

Sun and moon were not created as given us in verse 1; they were only made as "two great lights" on the fourth day; and, further, they were so set in relation to the earth, or the earth to them, as the case may be, that they ruled over the day and over the night, dividing the light from the darkness.

The waters now teem with life, and birds fly in the air... How beautifully, too, is seen the action of God's goodness in all this! He first creates an environment in which it is possible for His creatures to exist. For instance, plant life requires the dry land upon which to be established. That, therefore, is first brought up out of the waters. Animals need vegetable food, and this is first supplied in abundance before these creatures are brought into being.

Last of all, man is created on the same sixth day; but how different the language!... Notice the striking change. It is no longer, Let there be this or that; no longer, Let the waters, or Let the earth, bring forth: so had it been for all other things earthly. God marks the introduction of man with words of unparalleled solemnity. He, as has been often remarked, holds counsel with Himself about it. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Man, therefore, clearly stands, not only at the head of creation here below, with title to rule it, which no angel is said to possess, but with a place of peculiar nearness.

For what remains is rest, and only rest, God's rest in love over His accomplished work. Seven times He has pronounced all "good," the last time "very good." Now "evening" and "morning" come no more, but full, ripe, unending "day" — a day blessed and set apart by God as the day of His rest.

As soon as life is touched upon, life of such an order as involved reproduction of species, whether herb, tree, fish, fowl, creeping thing, or cattle, the immutable law which governs all such reproduction is laid down in the three words "after his kind"... Breeding and selection may modify a species within certain limits, but nothing can alter the species.