Genesis 1:13-19

2006.Apr.11 21:38

God fiddles with light

Read Genesis 1:13-10 | Full Chapter

In which God apparently decides that the light should be gathered into large burning balls of gas, and reflected off of at least one large ball of dust. Hee hee, funny one God, time to take your meds…

So, remember back in verses 3 through 5? God creates light, separates it from darkness and calls the former day and the latter night. I guess all that playing with plants (can you say opium?) gave him an idea. The light should come from something! But what? I know, nuclear reactions! Yay! In that he assumedly already got gravity going (what did the earth orbit?), nuclear reactions shouldn’t seem that odd. So, he makes the stars, including our favored sun, and the moon, which reflects the sun’s light, visible during most nights. He does this for four reasons, that is, real reasons, not the opium:

1. To give light to the earth (17)
2. To separate the light from the darkness (18)
3. To be signs for seasons, days, and years (14)
4. To govern the day and night (18)

Each of these reasons reveals the importance which God places on light and its counterpoint darkness, and continues to create finer distinctions.

The various light sources give light to the earth and separate light from darkness. These two things have already been done, earlier in the chapter, but now those roles are the responsibility of the stars, moon, and various other cosmic entities. Instead of simply “there is light”, there are the givers of light. We can see, but now we know why we can see. God does not want us just to know that there is goodness, but that there is a source of goodness, that in the larger sense, there are not just distinctions, but sources thereof.

God furthermore creates the methods for determining and recording time. He designs to "”let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years”" (Genesis 1:14, NASB) , bringing to mind when the Psalmist exhorts God to "”teach us to number our days / That we may present to You a heart of wisdom”" (Psalm 90:12, NASB) . God is timeless, by all appearances, yet he sets in motion for us to recognize times and seasons, to view our lives within a progression, and mark that time. Time necessarily relates to mortality. We are constrained to a brief span. Without God, we are under the control of time. Yet, when we recognize time, and learn to number our days, to realize the briefness of its span, we grow in wisdom. We can see where our claim to godhood must end, and how Jehovah is above this constraint and offers us a way out of it. It is one more step towards that great distinction of life/death, righteousness/sin, with God or set against him. We also see, by numbering our days and those of the species, the cycles of failure as humankind tries to establish its own godhood and destroys part of itself.

While we are not able to govern time, God does give the sun and moon a governance thereover. He shows us again the foolishness of our pride. The sun and moon, their positions, determine days and seasons. We, in all our intellect and self-reliance, cannot do that. These objects, one of burning gas, one of dust, do something we cannot. And yet we claim godhood and cling to that claim, a claim which keeps us from our friendship with the one true God who actually, really loves us. The opium, again? I’m pleased to say it’s not.

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.