The first command in God's Word is Let there be light. After introducing God as Creator of heaven and earth, the Book begins by describing earth, that is, our world, and the Bible describes it as tohu and bohu, as we have said in the past, in the Hebrew. That it was formless and empty. It existed in a chaotic state. There was futility there, it was covered in darkness. It describes a place, a state without God.
The church has taught that the language that Moses uses here in verses 1 and 2, as describing what happened to the earth, what happened to the whole galaxy, if you will, the solar system at least after, Satan's rebellion. This is the way it was once rebellious angels tried to take over God's throne and were spat back to earth by His might. That is called the gap theory. That is what creationists call it. That there was a gap of some time between the first verse and the second.
And if we are correct in believing that, it is a description then of the result of sin and rebellion. And so the earth that was without form and void, and darkened, where there was no light, that is the way that is opposed to God, that is the result of sin.
But the end of verse 2 informs us that God was poised to act. He was not willing to leave His creation in such a displeasing ruined state. His Spirit, that is, the power by which He works, was hovering in the darkness over the waters. It is almost like it was a bird just kind of hovering in the breeze, kind of like you see the gulls do on the beach, where they just seem to stay hovering as the wind holds them up. And of course, many people have drawn a parallel to the Spirit coming like a dove upon Jesus at His baptism, as kind of a throwback to this. That the One who was going to cleanse the world was here.
But that Spirit, His Spirit, was above the waters. And the image of hovering, the idea of hovering, gives you the idea of kind of a tenseness that is there. Like there is a readiness to go. It is almost like when you are on the starting line in a race. Everybody is just waiting for the gunshot to go off or the whistle to blow or the flag to wave. The Spirit was waiting for a command. Then God said, Let there be light. That was the command - and there was light. It happened. Light bloomed around the earth. So God banished the darkness for a time so He could work.
Notice it tells us there that once He saw the light and said it was good, that He divided the light from the darkness, and there was a day portion and a night portion, a light portion and a dark portion. And they became part of our day. Have you ever tried, let us say it is pitch black outside, but you have to do something and you do not have any light source. And so you try to fumble around and try to figure out how to do this thing and you never do it quite right. Even if you can do what it is that you need to do, you do not feel real secure about it because it is dark. You cannot see what you have just done, but you assume maybe that you got it okay.
But if you need to be able to see and light is not available or your abilities are not there, then you are going to have trouble. It is a struggle. But as soon as the ability to see is there and as soon as light is there, it becomes almost easy. You do not have to put quite so much work into it. So it is almost impossible to do anything well in darkness.
Jesus Himself says in John 9:3, that the night is coming when no one can work. It is a generality, but it is a truism. Work is far more difficult in darkness. We work best in the daylight, in the daytime when we can see because there is plenty of light to illuminate what we are doing.
God, then, brought light into the world to do His work of creation. That was the first thing He called for. I need a lamp. I can't see what's in here in the engine. You ever worked on a car at night? How much light do you need to do some of that work? And of course, there are shadows everywhere and you have to get the light in … . . .
Verse 5 is the one that I want to concentrate on here, just very briefly. God called the light Day.This is the Hebrew word yom. (You are familiar with it, probably, from reading in the newspaper about Yom Kippur. Yom, meaning day. The Day of Atonement.) Then the darkness He called Night. This is lailah. And the evening and the morning. Evening there is ba erev, and morning is boqer. What we are seeing here is that the Day (yom) consists of two parts: one is dark, and one is light. The dark is called lailah; and the light is called boqer.
I go to this verse because I want you to see, very clearly, that darkness and light are not the same thing. Lailah and boqer are NOT the same thing! They are shown here in opposition to one another (in contrast to one another). Yom consists of night and day (lailah and boqer). That is established in the fifth verse of the Book. That is very clear.
Element 6: What does night mean? What does morning mean? Did the Hebrews reckon time as we do? The Hebrew word lailah: I think that I am telling you the truth when I say that in every instance in the Old Testament, it is translated night - every time. And it means that period of time beginning at the end of ben ha arbayim and ending at dawn (or, at the break of day).
The word day is translated from the Hebrew yom. (You probably know it from Yom Kippur.) The word night (capitalized in my Bible, in verse 5) is lailah. Evening is ba erev, and morning is boqer. So, we have in that three verse span, yom (day), lailah (night), (evening) ba erev, and (morning) boqer.
