DAY FOUR

Genesis 1:14-19

And God said, Let there be lights [luminaries] in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so.

And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; (he made )the stars also. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule of the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

The logical progression of Creation continues on Day Four -- as God restores the permanent source of light required for the plants created on the previous day to live and synthesize food, as well as the daily and seasonal variations that influence life on Earth.

We saw earlier how, as part of the chaotic destruction that befell the solar system prior to the creation of man, that the earth may have stopped rotating, and the sun stopped radiating light.

If this correct, then the moon likewise, although damaged in the catastrophe as still evident today from its cratered surface, would of course have been in darkness because it is not self-luminous -- but simply reflects the light from the sun by means of a special reflective coating of glassy beads, similar to those suspended in the white paint now used in the construction of road signs.

The stars likewise were already in existence, despite the faulty wording of a key phrase in the translation quoted here, as we shall see in a moment.

Critics of the Genesis read into these verses that the sun, moon and stars were made by God on this fourth day of Creation Week, but that is not what the inspired account actually says. We saw earlier how God created a special light on Day One and used it to separate day from night as he set the Earth rotating. Here, that day-counting function is being transferred or restored to two lights in the sky, a greater one to rule the day and a lesser one to rule the night.

Up to this point, according to Old Earth theory, although the sun and moon were not producing light, they were already physically present, and did not need to be created, which is why the account speaks of "luminaries", rather than the physical bodies themselves -- a fact that has greatly puzzled the commentators. Evidently what God did on this fourth day, was to restore or create their light emissions, as if switching on a light bulb.

Victor Hamilton says of the account's author: "He uses the unusual expression 'the greater luminary' instead of the normal word for sun – ‘semes’ -- of which he undoubtedly was aware. In the same way he opts for 'the lesser luminary' instead of the familiar ‘yareah’, 'moon'. " Hamilton, like some other commentators, suggests that the words sun and moon have been deliberately left out because those heavenly bodies were worshipped by the ancient pagans. Scholars therefore describe this avoidance as being "anti-mythical" -- rather than probing to find the real reason for such careful choice of words.

The simple fact is that the Genesis account is meticulously worded, and the sun and moon are not mentioned here because they were not created here. What was created or restored here was their luminary potential -- in other words, the nuclear fusion reaction of the sun was re-ignited by God on the fourth day, thereby creating two sources of illumination in the sky.

The scholars fail to find the truth of Genesis, despite their erudition, because they are blinded by their evolutionary misconceptions into thinking that the creation account must be unreliable and unscientific before they even begin – assuming that because it is several thousand years old, it was cobbled together by semi-literate peasants who naively thought, for example, that the sun and moon were floating about in the sky like a high-flying bird or a cloud.

Typical of the balderdash spouted by such scholars are the comments of the "International Critical Commentary" which say: "The whole conception is as unscientific as it could be -- a) in its geocentric standpoint, b) in making the distinction of day and night prior to the sun, c) in putting the creation of the vegetable world before that of the heavenly bodies." With friends like this, does the Bible need enemies?

Returning to the account, three functions are assigned to the two luminaries -- a) to create the cycle of day and night, b) to provide a calendar framework -- months and years, and c) to provide the light that sustains all life by the process of photosynthesis.

The word translated "seasons" does not refer to the normal four seasons of the year, which are caused by the tilt of the earth axis, but to festival times. The Hebrew calendar involved a year of 13 months, based much more closely than ours on the movement of the moon -- a solar-lunar calendar. Months began with the new moon and people could get a good indication of the progress of the month simply by observing the current phase of the moon, a very practical arrangement, especially in an agrarian society and long before the advent of mass media.

In its job of ruling over the night, the moon is assisted by the stars. This simple fact, however, is obscured by a misleading mistranslation that probably resulted from a translator trying to make more clear what he assumed the intent of the account to be. Consequently, the phrase rendered: "He made the stars also" should simply read: "the stars also", or: "with the stars".

There is no "made" involved -- because the stars had of course been made much earlier, "in the beginning". What the account is saying here is simply that the stars were to assist the moon in its job of ruling over the night. The wording should therefore read: "the lesser light to rule the night, with the stars," which offers a very different meaning. In other words, what is being described here is not the physical creation of the stars or starlight, but simply their function. But what is that function?

As the earth travels in its orbit the sun -- at a speed exceeding 30,000 miles per hour -- a person gazing out into the night sky sees different groups of stars overhead week by week, month by month. As a result, when the sun rises in the morning, it does so out of a changing starry backdrop, a different constellation each month. This enabled people in ancient times, in addition to using the phases of the moon to fix the time of month, to also identify the particular month concerned by means of the constellations, as the earth progressed on its annual 13-month journey around the sun.

As we know, those constellations were given animal names, which accounts for the name "Zodiac" -- the sequence of constellations that form a belt around the equatorial region of the sky. Accordingly, without the aid of printed information or clocks, people were able to tell at what period of the year important events, such as the birth of a child, had occurred. Thus the account suggests that the Zodiac is not of pagan origin, but was part of the creative plan of God.

Returning to the account, having made the two luminaries, God then says that he "set" them in the firmament. It has been suggested that the word translated "set" can also mean "regulated" -- as when we "set" a clock or watch. The significance may be that God here adjusted the orbital speed of the earth around the sun and of the moon around the earth, and possibly also the period of rotation of the earth on its axis, all of which would have implications for their calendar and light-giving functions.

As regards the final function of the luminaries, we now know that light itself is essential to life on earth, enabling green plants to manufacture food by the process of photosynthesis – and that their biological clocks that affect factors such as blooming are influenced by day length.

We now travel on with the Earth into Day Five . . .