Genesis 1:3-4

2006.Mar.19 14:19

Creating Light

Read Genesis 1:3-4 | Full Chapter

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
(Genesis 1:3-4, NASB)

God’s first step, post creating “the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) is to create light. It’s interesting that it specifies “light” rather than, for example, “energy”. (http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/9_literal.html also uses the term “light” in its translation, so I’m going to more or less accept that). Creating light, particularly in contrast to “energy”, implies sight. And then he separates light from darkness. That is, he prepares a situation in which most humans can visibly see for part of the time. The use of sight, light and darkness are often used, in the Bible and elsewhere, to symbolize spiritual realities.

Then, it seems clear, that God deliberately wants us to get used to the idea that we don’t know everything, and he is, indeed, explicitly hiding some knowledge, some understanding from us. This is reiterated with the trees, later. In this, God calls light “good” but has no recorded comment here on the darkness. The darkness is not so much good, perhaps, as necessary. The darkness of the night is the absence of one sort of energy, just as a lack of certain knowledge is also the absence of a desire to sin in humans. To see some of the things God can see, we must be aware of the ability to hurt others. It might have been nice had that knowledge remained absent, but, then…well, perhaps that’s another subject.