3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness He called “night.” And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

Genesis 1:3-5 (NASB)

After yesterday’s first pass on these verses, let’s take a deeper dive today. This first day of creation He creates light. Later in the chapter, we’ll see that God creates the sun and moon on Day 4. We’ll address the common question then of how could there be light without the sun and moon? Click here for a preview. 

A few key things we discover:

Separation

Here we see more separation – light from darkness, day from night. Some would say that the separation is one of morality – separating good from bad. Others will say it’s not morality but rather, separating the holy from the mundane or “normal”, which gets into the sacrificial system whose pinnacle is Jesus.

It is good

God now starts identifying His creation, piece-by-piece, to be good – starting with the light. You may astutely ask, “Why did God say the light was good but not the darkness?” Firstly, the darkness existed from the beginning (v2). Darkness is the absence of light. The introduction of light brought the potential for life so I think that’s one reason God said it was good. I don’t think the darkness here refers to evil, but just absence of light.

Trinity in creation

We know God is a trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. All three were present at The Creation. We’ve already been introduced to God and the Spirit of God in v1, 2. Here we are introduced, indirectly, to the Son (discussed yesterday) who is the Word through which God created.

First day

We won’t discuss whether the days of Genesis are literal days or periods of time. There are lots of articles and opinions. One is called the “Day-age” theory explained here. I choose the literal view since we’re talking about God creating and He can do whatever He wants however He desires. As we noted previously, He can even “create history”, an “old earth” as explained here in enduringword.com.

RЯeflection

• Let’s remember that God spoke creation into existence. That means he spoke and light was created. As I think of the light of the sun and how hot (and powerful) it is so many millions of miles away, then multiply that by N billion stars like our sun, that’s a LOT of light. And our God created it with a word!