Day 1: Let There Be Light!

One of the fundamental “laws” of human thinking is the principle of sufficient reason. It tells us that a cause cannot give to an effect that which it does not have in its power. It is not simply that a cause cannot give to an effect that which it does not possess. That would be too ambiguous. After all, does it have to “possess” x, y, and z attributes of the effect in every sense? That would make the cause identical in power to its effect because it would be identical per se. In the case of God, while He has the power to bring about all of the effects we see, none of these are “in” Him, as each of them are finite in every respect. Most of them are composite, all of them are mutable. By the very definition of creatureliness, they are all contingent.

Yet there are some divine attributes that we say, by analogy, were communicated to something in creation such that we call them by the same name. Light is a rare example of that in the category of physical phenomena. We are told that “God is light” (1 Jn. 1:5). The analogy is evidently so crucial that the Apostle John does not bother to say that God is like light, or that light is like God. He takes us straight to the predicate nominative. This is an example of what Jonathan Edwards once called “images of divine things.” What we are going to contemplate now is not this or that scientific dimension of light, but rather the way in which God’s creation of light on Day 1 sets a pattern for the rest of Scripture. Indeed, I will argue that it sets a threefold pattern.

In all things, the God of light decrees, divides, and defines. Let us take each of these in turn.

God Decrees—and It Exists

‘And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light’ (v. 3). One commentator helpfully notes that,

“the verb translated ‘said’ is used ten times in Genesis 1, with each day beginning with God speaking, except the seventh day”.1

Here is the foundation of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. That Latin expression began to be used by theologians who were just taking seriously what the Genesis account plainly says. As the Psalmist put it, “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (33:9); or in the New Testament, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Heb. 11:3).2 So creation ex nihilo means creation “out of nothing.” All that means is that God borrowed from nothing outside of Himself, as there was nothing from which to borrow.

While the whole of this first created phenomenon teaches that God is a “speaking God,” the first implication is how the divine speech is creative. It does not merely summon that which is, but, as Paul says, He “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).

But how can God create darkness as well as light? One of the early heretical groups—the Manicheans—held to a dualistic worldview where light and darkness were equal ultimate substances. Augustine briefly followed this group, but when he became a Christian, he wrote his commentary on Genesis for the most part against their errors. But they pressed this exact point on the Genesis text. Augustine’s answer gives us an important foundation to understand that light and darkness are not equals. He says,

“because where there is no light there is darkness; not that darkness is actually something, but that the sheer absence of light is called darkness. Just as silence is not an actual thing, but where there is no sound it is called silence; and nakedness is not an actual thing, but where a body is without clothes it is called nakedness; and emptiness is not actually something, but a place in which there is no material body is said to be empty.”3

What Augustine was pressing upon his Manichean opponents was that light is the original. Light is of being; darkness is deprivation of being. That darkness seems to precede in the creation account, that is, in temporal sequence, is purely for the benefit of the reader. There is a metaphysical implication to all of this.

But, someone may say, Scripture elsewhere says that God equally makes darkness as He does light: “I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things” (Isa. 45:7). This is a difficult concept to be sure. So God Himself makes the first distinction to help us with this.

God Divides—and It is Good

‘And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness’ (v. 4). One difficulty immediately presents itself: If “God is light” (1 Jn. 1:5), why was there any darkness anywhere? He is clearly making a value judgment of the light over the darkness. True, it doesn’t say here that the darkness is “bad,” but He doesn’t call them both “good” either. What is going on is actually very simple. God is foreshadowing here—in a somewhat literal sense, we might say. Fore-shadowing. “But the world before the fall could not be the ‘shadowlands’ could it?” Let us not mix up the literal and symbolic here. Actual physical shadows are not evil, nor is outer space. This is God introducing an important moral category by simple, visible imagery. In the Bible, light symbolizes blessing (Num. 6:24) and God’s presence to bless (Ps. 27:1); whereas darkness symbolizes that which stands opposite to God—the ways of evildoers (Prov. 2:13) and death (Job 10:21) and the place of the curse (2 Pet. 2:4).

Light is dividing. This is actually the first of three separations. You will see two others in Days 2 and 3. Here it is not simply that God divides the light from the darkness, as a parent would separate two twin children from fighting. Since God is light, light is the favored one. You already experience this every time you turn on the light. When you turn on the light, darkness flees. At best, it hides in the closet or under the bed. But when a room is already lit, you can’t empty out a bucket of “dark” into it and have it spread so that the light goes away. Think of this as the ultimate laser surgery. But we are not to see this as Yin and Yang—as two equal opposites—but light is the superior. It also reminds us that God is sovereign over darkness. Even the darkness will fulfill God’s purposes in the end.

We will see in Genesis 3:15 that God makes the first division in the world. God places warfare between the two seeds. But this separation of light from darkness prefigures that. God divides. The Son of God would divide when He came into this world. He said,

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Mat. 10:34-36).

Now as to God Himself, Paul tells us that He “dwells in inapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16). That’s actually a problem if you are in the dark, so to speak. And so the biggest separation—really, the divide that marks all others—is this infinite divide between light and darkness. We speak of “grey areas,” but this is only a manner of speaking. When it comes to ultimate light, or that inapproachable Light, the Bible gets going by banishing the thought of any middle ground.

He is always separating light and dark for us, and showing us that this is good. The division is good. The separation is good. We do not want those mixing. In the first place, mixing them will get us in trouble with God and cause trouble for our fellow man.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isa. 5:20).

What God put out as a warning through the prophet, He first wove into the fabric of the universe. Our world warns us against the great evil of polarization; but in the Bible, God is the first polarizer and He warns us against compromising with the opposite poll. He says things like,

“Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” (2 Cor. 6:14-16).

When we care more about getting along with the world than about offending a holy God, this is the first sign that the light has gone out in our own soul.

God Defines—and It is True

This is the first of three times it says God ‘called’ (vv. 5, 8, 10) something such and such. As a scientific detail, commentators will note that to call these Day and Night on this day shows that the earth is rotating, that “there was established a cyclical succession of days and nights,”4 so that, whatever view one takes of the nature of the light source here, as compared to Day 4, at the very least, the day-night pattern is already in place. This is one part of the argument for a literal rendering of the Day, along with the Hebrew word yom—though, we will have to come back to that. For now, what is the significance of this divine “calling”?

Augustine said,

“But with God there is just sheer understanding, without any utterance and diversity of tongues. But wherever it says ‘He called,’ it means ‘he caused to be called,’ because he so distinguished and arranged all things as to make it possible for them to be told apart and given names.”5

The act of “calling,” or naming, things in Scripture is something we find out represents lordship or mastery. Definition is an act of dominion. To name something is to draw the very first boundaries around a thing, so as to say, “This is what that thing is, and it is not something else, something contrary to what I’m saying it is.” This is why Postmodern philosophy existed. This was its role in the devil’s revolution against God’s boundaries. As nonsensical as Postmodernism was and is, what people often missed was that Postmodern thinkers were correct about the function of speech. They took a cynical view toward this function, but were not wrong to discern the function.

Speech signifies meaning. Each word is a sign. Whether with the mouth or in print, a sign has been posted in the world. And sign-posts are associated with fences for good reason. The Postmoderns saw this and concluded that declarative speech—that is speech functioning as a vehicle for objective truth claims—is colonialist and oppressive. While they were wrong to see this as a violence against humanity, what they were bristling against was dominion. In calling created things what they are, God was colonizing His creation, and we will see in Chapter 2 that He calls His image-bearers to copy Him in this: to name things, and to end those sentences in periods.   

Circling back to the declaration of GOODNESS, that is not simply about light. That refrain occurs six times (vv. 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25) and then for the seventh time it says “very good” (v. 31). It is not a divine discovery, but rather a “divine complacency” or “divine satisfaction.”6 But what was so good? If it would be absurd to think of God here as being taken by surprise, being struck by a “goodness” that is beyond Him, then what other possibility is left? Clearly what is so good about all that He calls good is the light of His own reflection. It is the goodness of God that all of His works reflect back to Him. He has made all things to speak about Himself (again, that is the point of Psalm 19:1); and so His glory is at stake in our recognition of the proper naming of all things, the proper shape of all things, which is really to say the proper nature of all things.

But the sevenfold GOOD is also an affirmation about creation as such, and it refutes what would become the main earliest heresy against the Christian faith. I am speaking of Gnosticism which held that creation in general, and matter in particular, were evil. Yet we distinguish between the design and the distortion, and we make this distinction down to the present day. Paul says,

“For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:4).

The Apostle was saying this in response to those who forbid certain foods; but, as we will see, the principle applies to any view that fails to distinguish between the design and the distortion. God’s design is never, ever to be reduced to man’s distortion.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. There is an ethics of light and darkness. Now you might think, “Ethics! This early? Human beings are not on the scene yet—how can there be ethics?” But what I mean is that God was laying some foundations for human morality even before man and woman got there. Consider these words.

“In your light do we see light” (Ps. 36:9).

It has been said that God is very much like the sun in one sense—you cannot look directly at Him, but without Him, you cannot see anything else for what it is. But this ultimate source of light is personal: “God is light” (1 Jn. 1:5). Consequently, the privation that we call “darkness” is a disordering of all that is personal. The fact that light is the original and darkness the parasitical, issues forth throughout all of the orders of creation. Indeed, this is what it means for these to be “orders” and their collapse to be a disorder. And the beginning and end of this whole chapter—with the unfilled and unformed at the beginning and the seventh “very good” at the end—points clearly to the goodness of God filling all things, and our filling all things, and that the resources that God has provided mankind with are intrinsically good.

Use 2. Consolation. Having darkness as a backdrop for light is not the only reason that darkness is recorded first. What we have in the turning from night to day (as the Hebrew measure of a day was a reflection of) is nothing less than that gospel truth that was captured in the Reformation maxim—post tenebras lux; “After darkness, light.” In other words, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:5), or as it was promised in the prophets,

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone” (Isa. 9:2).

So there is gospel on the very first day. Light cannot come out of darkness. So the miracle of a Christian being created is no less of a supernatural act than the creation of the universe. Paul makes the link for us:

“For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

If you can hear this and understand and love the God who did it, that cannot be chalked up to the darkness. Light is evidence of grace. Seeing Christ for who He is means that God has said to your spiritually dead soul—Let there be light! Let there be a Christian!

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1. Richard Belcher, Genesis: The Beginning of God’s Plan of Salvation (Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2012 ), 53.

2. cf. Psalm 33:6; 148:5; Proverbs 8:22-27

3. Augustine, On Genesis, I.4.7 [26].

4. Henry Morris, The Genesis Record: A Scientific & Devotional Commentary on the Book of Beginnings (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1976), 55.

5. Augustine, On Genesis, I.9.15 [32].

6. E. J. Young, In the Beginning: Genesis 1-3 and the Authority of Scripture (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976), 16.