This is the second of a three-part study of Genesis 1.
1:3-5 – Light
In God’s final actions of the first day, that He addresses the problem of darkness. In evaluating God’s giving of light, we should evaluate the order of events of His creative activity on the first day. This pattern is declaration, execution, assessment, modification, renaming. First, God announces what will happen; then it happens; then He assess its quality; then He grabs hold of it and changes it; and then finally He renames the changed thing. This pattern is not an exact model for days two through six, but it does provide us with a good rubric for evaluating them. Thus later on, when we see departures from this pattern, it helps us identify them and evaluate the reasons for this departure.
Now let us examine the nature of the light described in the above verse. There is a tendency among those taking a concordist approach towards the creation account to suggest that this light is shone forth by the sun but only in some indistinct, indefinite way because it is obscured by a cloud canopy. I reject any such inclination to identify the light of verse 3 with the sun, not because we shouldn’t attempt to find touchpoints between Biblical exegesis and scientific inquiry, but because the text simply doesn’t justify the identification. As I already stated, the celestial light-bearers are not created until the fourth day. Some will posit that the fourth day is simply the time of appearance and commissioning of the sun, moon, and stars.[1] Unfortunately for those holding this few, there is nothing in the text to suggest that anything but the actual making of these bodies occurs on the fourth day. Therefore, the sun wouldn’t have yet even existed to be revealed on the first day.
As Meredith Kline demonstrates, and as James Jordan reiterates, “the visible manifestation of God’s throne-environment in creation is always the work of the Spirit.”[2] Thus it is the very Spirit hovering over the waters that manifests light through the showing forth of God’s Shekhinah glory in the glory cloud. Given this, the question may arise: If this Spirit was the source and cause of the showing forth of light when the world was created, and it was through the sending forth of the same Spirit that the world was created, why was the world not created in an illuminated state, rather than in a dark one?
I believe Scripture provides us with two answers. First, it is clear that God reveals Himself in manifold ways. This seems obvious enough, but we must self-consciously avoid the temptation to collapse God’s self-revelation into a single facet. Not only does God reveal Himself in three persons; but each of these three persons also reveals through multiple aspects and modes.[3] Furthermore, within each of these aspects and modes, the persons of God have multiple roles they play to reveal themselves. Think of God the Father’s different names revealing different aspects of God’s personality, or the Son’s multiple manifestations in Melchizedek and Jesus doing the same (although with the latter providing a full self-revelation). In a similar way, the Spirit can demonstrate its presence in different visual phenomena; in this case in both darkness and light. This is exemplified elsewhere in Scripture in a single event on the shores of the Red Sea, when in Exodus 14:19-20 the glory cloud passes behind the Israelites and stands between them and the Egyptian Army. To God’s chosen people, the glory cloud shows light, but to God’s enemies, the Egyptians, the glory cloud shows darkness. In this moment we see the Israelites moving from the darkness, chaos, and emptiness (poverty/slavery) of Egypt to the light, order, and abundance of the Promised Land, led and protected by the Spirit who is both darkener and light-giver. So first, it is God’s multifaceted self-presentation that enables Him to reveal Himself in the Spirit in both darkness and light.
Secondly, it is because the Spirit itself inherently moves from darkness to light that we see this same behavior in creation. This pattern is set in the first moments of creation as the same darkening/illuminating Spirit from the shores of the Red Sea first hovers over the waters of the earth. Based upon how we see the Spirit behave, and what we intuitively know about light, we should think of God’s Spirit not merely as light, but more fully as darkness-overcoming light. Just as part of light’s inherent behavior is that it pushes back darkness, so too does the Spirit inherently push back Darkness. As the sustaining power that binds the Trinity, it can perhaps be posited that the Spirit is the force that preemptively and unfailingly pushes back and overpowers the forces of darkness that effetely attempt to attack and divide God. Thus there is in a sense a way in which the Spirit is moving God from darkness to light, or perhaps more appropriately from glory to greater glory.[4] This way in which the Spirit interacts with God’s Self is extended to how the Spirit interacts with Creation from the literal dawn of time as it moves it from darkness to light to darkness to greater light.
Furthermore, I think that understanding the nature and source of this light answers other questions, such as, “Where was this light source located?” The simplest and perhaps most Biblically-founded answer seems to be, “Nowhere and everywhere.” As before, driven by modernistic concordist objectives, there may be the desire to fix this point of light at a single point to provide a rotating earth with a point around which to orbit during these first three sunless days. I think this is unnecessary. Because the light shines forth from the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters, and presumably over the whole earth simultaneously, it would be my view that the whole earth is illumined by the Spirit’s glory. Our God is a God whose light darkness cannot overcome (John 1:4-5). Our God is a God whose instruction is a life-guiding light (Psalm 119:102-105). The Spirit then in its alternation (chronological separation) of darkness-to-light in the first three days instructs, as a mother does her child, the cosmos in the pattern it will soon follow, so that the creation is eschatologically-oriented to overcome the darkness, culminating in the refulgence of God’s dwelling among us in the New Heavens and New Earth (Revelation 21). Good indeed.
1:6-8 – The Firmament
The second day is notable in that it commences God’s addressing of the problem of formlessness.[5] But the second day is also curious because it both greatly modifies the way God interacts with His Creation, and blatantly omits God’s assessment of His work that day. First, God’s mode of interacting with Creation changes from His unmediated self-action upon Creation in His speaking forth His self-generated light, to His mediated action upon Creation by His making and use of the firmament. God could here again act merely by the power of His Word without any means, but we are clearly told He does otherwise. Instead God makes the firmament from pre-existing matter and then uses the firmament to separate the waters. Just as the Spirit instructs the cosmos to partake in the illumination that overcomes darkness, the Spirit also trains it to partake in the ordering that overcomes formlessness.
Now if God’s execution of His purpose is notable in the second day because of His use of the Creation itself, God’s missing favorable assessment of His work is truly befuddling. Simply put, the question is quite obvious: “Why doesn’t God recognize the firmament as good?” Actually, we must re-orient this question, for God does eventually call the firmament, and everything else He’s made good (Genesis 1:31). More accurately, we should ask, “Why doesn’t God recognize the firmament as good, yet?”
I will answer this question in part now and more fully when we come to day six. My initial response to the omitted positive assessment is that it was omitted because the firmament modified the way God would relate to the non-heavenly realm. James Jordan tells us in Creation in Six Days that the firmament separates Heaven from Earth.[6] Therefore, the firmament in some sense (certainly not a base or sinful one) created a separation between God and Earth. This separation received no commendation, not because it was bad or evil, but because it was part of a godly-separation that was not yet fully-consummated and thus could not be called good.
1:9-10 – The Earth and Seas
What plainly jumps out right away when looking at day three is that God simply creates a lot of stuff. Day three shows a dramatic departure from the declaration, execution, assessment, modification, renaming pattern set on day one. The model though, as stated before, serves as a good rubric to use for bringing up points of inquiry regarding God’s action. Simply stepping through day three, we can frame it using the above labels as follows: declaration, execution/modification, renaming, announcement, execution/modification, assessment. I am thus going to split the third day into two parts – the first for the Earth and Seas, the second for the plants and trees.
In the first part of the third day, God announces that the waters should be gathered and the dry land appear; it happens; and God calls the former Seas and the latter Earth. It is here in the way God’s direction is executed, that we first see the Spirit’s nurturing guidance start to pay off. God doesn’t simply act unilaterally through immediate self-action, as He does on the first day. Nor does He act through means upon the Creation and with the Creation as on the second day. Instead, God calls and the Creation responds. The Creation is for the first time an active participant in the work of creation. We’d certainly eschew any suggestion that the earth responds autonomously apart from God’s empowerment, as if it had an independent, self-determining consciousness, which could somehow choose whether or not to follow God’s command. But more appropriately, we should see that it as a God-oriented Creation, attuned to God’s voice, which sings back in joyful response to the Word which God sends forth. It is indeed God’s voice, which when sent out into the world accomplishes God’s purposes (Isaiah 55:11), which evokes this joyous antiphony.
Again we see God omitting His favorable assessment. As before, God will eventually assess the Earth and Seas to be good, and as before I believe that the assessment is presently withheld because God’s work with them is yet unconsummated. As God is still in a sense separated from His Creation by the firmament, He views the Earth and Seas as incomplete due to their lack of fitting mediators and rulers.
Finally, in this first part of the third day, we don’t see God perform a formal modification. The gathering of the waters can be viewed in itself as an act of execution/modification, thus although there isn’t a pure subsequent act of modification, it is natural to see God giving both the waters and dry land new names: Seas and Earth.
1:11-13 – The Plants and Trees
In looking at the second – plants and trees – part of the third day, I want to make just a few observations. First, we see God beginning to address the problem of emptiness. Secondly, again we see the earth actively respond to God’s command. In this action, the earth doesn’t merely re-arrange the furniture. It matures one step further, mimics God even more closely, and brings forth something new – the grass, herbs, and fruit trees – that were not previously there. Now certainly there is a qualitative difference between God’s creating the heaven and the earth out of nothing, and the earth’s bringing forth something new out of pre-existing matter. But even while we maintain the infinite distinction between Creator and Creation, we shouldn’t avoid pointing out the way in which the Creation comes to increasingly resemble its Creator. The Creation’s creatio originalis is the loving childlike mimicry of the Creator’s creatio ex nihilo.
Thirdly, here at the end of the third day, it must be noted that God sees that the grass, herbs, and trees are good. There is no explicit or implicit indication that this assessment is expanded beyond the vegetation to the Earth and Sea. Yet at the same time, the vegetation is still separated from God, just like the Earth and the Sea and the firmament. So why is it still blessed? Because the vegetation provides means that bring us into full communion with God. Taking cues from Jordan, we can see that grain (seed) and grapes (fruit) are the key ingredients in bread and wine, which are the elements of our communion feast with God.[7] Also, we can see trees as ladders to Heaven where we meet God, such as at the Palm Tree of Deborah (Judges 4:4-5). In short, the grass, herbs, and trees are all called good because they mediate God’s work and they bring us closer to God.
Andrew J. Bittner is a Certified Lay Minister in the United Methodist Church, Minnesota Annual Conference, and a student of the Trinity House Institute.
[1] William L. Craig, “Creation and Evolution (Part 5).” Audio blog post. Reasonable Faith. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.
[2] Jordan, Through New Eyes, 43.
[3] Jordan, “Twelve Fundamental Avenues of Revelation”, 2-3.
[4] Jordan, “Introduction to Biblical Theology,” 8.
[5] Jordan, Creation in Six Days, 40-41.: Jordan reminds us that formlessness should not be thought of as unrestrained chaos, but instead boundarylessness. It is merely a condition associated with incomplete maturation. Clearly the firmament is itself just the type of boundary needed to overcome formlessness
[6] Jordan, Creation in Six Days, 178-79.
[7] Jordan, Through New Eyes, 82.