Charles Spurgeon’s Morning Devotion for today was on Genesis
1:4. The context reads like this: “3 And God said, ‘Let there be light,’
and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God
separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the
darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the
first day.” (Genesis 1:3-5) This has always been a fascinating passage for me
in two ways; one relates to the physics, and the other to the linguistics.
First the physics. You don’t have to be Bill Nye the
(atheistic) Science Guy to find this passage a bit puzzling. These verses
recount the activity of God on the first creation day. It is not until the
fourth day that God created the elements which we think of as the sources of
light. The question, even for believers, is how there could be light without a
source of light.
As my regular readers know, I am interested in physics in a
general way, although the absence of any advanced math skills makes it
difficult for me to follow many of the usual explanations for how things work.
Case in point: E=mc2. According to NOVA, “It's
the world's most famous equation, but what does it really mean? ‘Energy equals
mass times the speed of light squared.’ On the most basic level, the equation
says that energy and mass (matter) are interchangeable; they are different
forms of the same thing. Under the right conditions, energy can become mass,
and vice versa. We humans don't see them that way—how can a beam of light and a
walnut, say, be different forms of the same thing?—but Nature does.”
Substitute the word “God” for NOVA’s “Nature,” and the
puzzle continues. This may mean that by causing light to come into existence on
the first creation day, God introduced the building blocks for everything we
call the material universe. We now know that at the most elemental level, at a
sub-sub-microscopic level, matter is made up of energy. Every molecule has constituent
atoms made of little packages of energy spinning about a central package of
energy. At this point in our sub-atomic understanding, physicists haven’t found
anything that can be called “matter.” It’s all energy organized into structures
that become what we know as matter.
Enough with the nuclear physics. Genesis 1 also has an
interesting linguistic element that may actually flow from E=mc2. I
will not enter the debate about whether the creation day lasted precisely 24
hours; if you want to believe that, the text allows for that interpretation.
However, there is something interesting about how the creation days are bounded.
“And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” Unlike our
Western thought, the Hebrews saw evening as the start of a day. The word for
evening is rich in meaning, but it primarily refers to the coming of darkness.
The first creation day began in darkness into which God spoke light.
Similarly, the Hebrew word for morning used in Genesis 1:5
carries the idea of the coming of light, often indicating the period before the
sun rises. So what this verse tells us is that God started with nothing (darkness)
and spoke something (light) into existence. Light itself is a mysterious
element. (I’m getting back to physics again.) Scientists tell us it is like a
beam of particles when observed as matter, but it is a wave of energy when
observed as energy. Either way, Genesis says God brought order into disorder.
Skim through the entire Bible and you will find numerous
instances where light is equated with all that is good, and darkness is equated
with evil. That which is good is that which aligns with God’s order; that which
is evil is outside of God’s design. John says that Jesus is the true light
coming into the world. The Spurgeon devotional which inspired this piece contains
this prayer: “O Lord, since light is so good, give us more of it, and more of
thyself, the true light.” A prayer for
light is not a bad prayer for a new year – or anytime, for that matter.
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