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On the first day of creation, God created light and darkness and gave them names (Day and NIght), beginning the day/night cycle for the days of the week. If this is so, wasn’t the day/night cycle already in place before the sun/moon were created
on the fourth day of creation? Why was the sun needed to give light upon the earth (verse 17), if God had already created light on day one. And why was the sun needed to divide the light from the darkness (verse 18) when God had already done this on day one of creation?
GB
I love questions like this because they require us to think and go beyond the traditional explanations.
What makes questions like this difficult for some are the assumptions with which we come to the Bible. Some assume that the Genesis account is an account of God’s creation of the entire universe, but a careful reading of the Bible demonstrates such an assumption is not true.
Job 38:7 tells us the sons of God sang together for joy when earth was created. In other words, intelligent beings were already in existence when God created life on earth. In Hebrews, the Bible tells us that God, through His Son, “made the worlds.” (1:2 ASV). Genesis is not the account of the creation of the entire universe, but is the record of God’s creation of life on planet earth. The universe itself, with its many worlds, was already in existence when God came to this corner of the Milky Way to terra-form planet Earth. With this in mind let us explore Genesis 1:2:
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.”
The words translated formless, empty, and darkness are describing a deep void, abyss, hole, or emptiness in space which is so impenetrable that light cannot even escape, what we might call a “black hole.” On day one of Creation Week, when God said, “Let there be light,” God dissipated this “hole” already in existence in the Milky Way from God’s previous creation of the universe. The light from the stars of the universe could now pass through, thus, “let there be light.”
On day four God created the Sun, Moon, and stars of our solar system (Venus, Mercury, Mars, etc.). The “evening and morning” designation or “day/night” description on day one is the Hebrew way of describing a 24 hour period, it is describing the rotation of the earth on its axis every 24 hours. It is ensuring the reader that God’s terra-forming of planet earth occurred in seven 24 hours periods, not over billions of years.
This understanding also reconciles much of the geological arguments against a young earth. The matter at the core of “hole” was created by God billions of years ago when He created the universe. But it wasn’t until approximately 6,000 years ago that God came to this section of the Milky Way, dissipated the “hole” and used this ancient matter to create this solar system and life on earth. Thus, the inanimate material on earth dating billions of years old in no way undermines our confidence in God’s Word and His creation of life on earth approximately 6,000 years ago.
[editor: This is only a speculative theory. Actually, the laws of physics break down “inside” a black hole, because matter ceases to exist. That is, a black hole is an infinitely small, infinitely dense, one dimensional, “point” in space where all the mass of all the matter that has fallen in to it resides. Matter, by definition, is 3-dimensional, thus is cannot exist in a one dimensional entity. So, to say God dissolved a black hole and used the matter inside to create the solar system poses infinitely more physics problems than simply saying God created matter out of nothing and made it appear to be billions of years old, OR that Earth was a rogue, ice-covered, rocky-core planet (had no star to orbit – free-“floating” in space) God created along with the rest of the universe billions of years ago – the ancient heavens – and simply “terraformed” it into a habitable sphere by hovering above and surrounding it with his glorious brightness – “and there was light.” – before creating the star we call Sol]
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