Genesis 1:3-5

Today I’m going to delve into the actual scripture here, rather than a personal story like last time, because there are some excellent things to point out about elements here that I once just blew past. For ages I considered my flannelgraph Sunday school explanation as sufficient. “God made all the stuff, and He made it in this order. End of story. Isn’t God super cool peachy keen?” As usual, yes…but I have been a non-milk drinker for a long time now and I’ve got questions and ideas to press on with.

Day 1: God’s first act of creation is to speak light into existence and we see how powerful He is. With a word (and, as John tells us, with THE Word) a thing that was not suddenly was. The second thing was we, God’s second act, is to make a judgement. He sees that the light is good. Good as opposed to bad. The third act of God here is a separation of the light from the darkness. Does this mean that light is good and darkness is bad? Sure, I think someone could make that case, but I think the far more interesting thing is that the darkness already existed. It isn’t a substance or a created thing like light is. Dark is the absence of light, not a thing itself. But, nonetheless, God’s fourth act is to name something. Some two things, actually. He calls the light “Day” and the darkness “Night”.

A question naturally springs up here. We know that all life needs light. Plants capture the light as energy, animals eat the plants to use and store energy, we eat the animals and use their stored energy. All life on Earth requires light. However, where was the light? What was causing the light? The sun isn’t created until the fourth day. The sun isn’t the source of light here on day one because on day three the plants spring to life. Somehow without the sun or moon, we have an evening and a morning.

As we saw in a previous Diary entry, this darkness is not simply an absence of light. We saw that it also means “ignorance, misery, sorrow, destruction, and wickedness”. It was this that “grieved” or caused emotion in the Spirit of God to create. The light isn’t the physical light of the sun or the moon, but it seems to be a spiritual light that I would not be surprised comes from God Himself.

(PsychoTheory Warning: The following is a theory, not a deeply held belief.) I would not be surprised if at the end of my life I came to find that the physical and the spiritual are wholly interconnected, that light has a physical and a spiritual side. I don’t mean this metaphorically.

Here I am thinking along similar lines as Thomas Aquinas who tells us that humans are both physical and spiritual beings. Many Christian expressions of faith believe that the physical side of us is a mistake, that we need to suppress it and treat it as worthless, to long to discard it, and that our true expression as God intended will be when we die and walk with Him in heaven.

Except, that God created us intentionally as both. Adam and Eve were physical and spiritual. We are only fully human as God created and intended when we are a soul inside a body. Now, I could diverge here and talk about how I believe that Heaven is a holding place and not our final destination, but that doesn’t serve our purpose here.

The Light and the Dark, Day and Night, in the absence of celestial bodies indicates a similar duality. Especially in the original language it appears to be so. Something is emanating a light that will sustain plant life. The only thing that exists, at this point, that is connected with the light is God Himself, a spiritual light. Elsewhere, the scriptures tell us that in Him we move, live, and have our being and that He sustains all things.

Even when we get to the fourth day, the sun and moon aren’t there to be the day or the night but to “rule” over the day and the night. The greater and lesser “light” aren’t even the light itself in the Hebrew, but a luminary. They shine the light, but are not the light itself. As a word nerd, that fascinates me and I’m still not sure what to do with it all.

The closest I can come to making sense of any of this is that light is both physical and spiritual thing. Darkness is not a physical or spiritual thing. It is the absence of light, both physical and spiritual. There are consequences to physical darkness and spiritual darkness. In physical darkness we become cold, it is hard to see, and we are easily lost and prone to danger when we would not otherwise be in full light. The same can be said when we are in spiritual darkness.

Interestingly, when Jesus refers to His followers as “the light of the world” in Matthew 5, it is this exact same concept. We are not the light itself, but the lamp, the sun that projects the light. We are luminaries of the light that is Him, the candle that burns brightly but isn’t the light itself that it casts.