Creation Day 4
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2018 · 26 August 2018
We come now to day four in Creation which is described in Genesis 1:14-19, “And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so.”
“16 And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.”
The Bible describes the creation of all the stellar bodies that occupy the vast endless space around us. Evolution has struggled to explain all the bodies that exist in the universe, how they could have evolved out of spontaneous generation. All of the orbiting spaceships have given no insight into how the bodies in the universe could have possibly evolved. And that’s understandable because they didn’t.
Genesis 1:14-19 simply says, God made them all. When it says that God made the stars along with the sun and the moon, it is saying something about His immense power. That simple statement at the end of verse 16, which says, “the stars also” is so staggering to be beyond comprehension. Light has to travel 32,000 years before it will reach the center of the Milky Way, our galaxy. And there are at least 50 billion galaxies in the universe.
Most of the stars you see are not actually stars, but are rather multiple star systems revolving around a center mass. Now if light travels a couple more million years, it will encounter open space. It takes another 20 billion years before it reaches the edge of the known universe. After 20 billion years of travel, it will pass 50 billion galaxies with about 100 billion stars.
So how can such a distant light reach the earth so fast in a six-day creation? If it takes light hundreds of thousands of years to get here, how can we see it instantly? Well, God can not only make the stars out there, and make us here, but he could create all the light in between also instantaneously. Light already existed, it was created on day one according to Genesis 1:3. And so, all He had to do was to put it where He wanted it.
Every set of stars, every one of these galaxies has the fingerprint of God upon it different from any other. George Wald, who came from Harvard and was the winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, acknowledged this dilemma. He said, and I quote from the Scientific American Journal, “The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation. But the only alternative is a single primary act of supernatural creation.”
Wald went on to state his view, “One has to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet, here we are.” He did not believe that the entire universe consisting of billions upon billions of galaxies is the product of irrational random spontaneous generation, something coming into existence out of nothing by chance.
Let us go for a moment from this immense universe to the smallest complexity of life, your DeoxyriboNucleic Acid, DNA. This exists in every single cell. Your body has 100 trillion cells or so. And every cell has an actual physical strip of DNA. It is coded information that is coiled up. Now, you have 46 segments in that little coil. Twenty-three came from your father and 23 came from your mother to make the 46.
The combination of your father’s and your mother’s DNA make up the 46 to determine what you look like, much of your personalities and abilities precisely and explicitly. That little coil determines exactly how every single cell in your body is to function throughout your entire life. If all your cells have the same 46 segments of DNA components, let us just uncoil them. One little cell DNA strip would be 7 feet long.
It would be so thin that we couldn’t see it under an electron microscope. That’s in every one of you 100 trillion cells. However, if all the DNA in your body is stretched out and connected together, it would stretch from here to the moon one-half million times. If all this densely coded information were placed in type written form, it would fill the Grand Canyon 50 times. That is how fearfully and wonderfully you are made.
You can go to the farthest most complex part of the universe or you can look into the smallest complexity of the cells within the human body, and all you are going to see is the hand of an intelligent and powerful creator. Now let’s look at your brain. Your brain has about 100,000 billion electrical connections, yet your brain fits in a quart jar and operates for 70 years on 10 watts of power fueled largely by what you eat.
The only reasonable view is that the universe was created by God more powerful, more complex, and more intelligent than we could ever imagine. But we don’t have to wonder how he did it, because He told us how He did it. We have the account. Many evolutionary scientists tried to explain how the universe evolved but they cannot. In one day, God filled the universe with all the stars, suns, and moons by His word.
The creation is introduced in verse 1 with an overview statement, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That’s the summary statement and as in that statement you have everything that is notable categorized. Herbert Spencer who died in 1903 said that all that is knowable in the universe can be summed up in five categories, time, force, action, space and matter. Everything that exists can fit into that.
Then starting in verse 2 it begins to describe how He did that. He did that in a six-day process. That process is described from Genesis 1:2 till Genesis 2:3. This is then the generations of the heavens and the earth. On day one God made the material, He created the space, the time and the matter. He created a universe that was unformed and uninhabitable and then He created light as it indicates to us in verses 2 through 5.
On day two, He separated the waters that covered the surface of the earth and took some waters above and left some below on the earth. Versus 6 through 8 talk about that and in the middle He created the expanse that we know as heaven. He sent some water above to exactly where we don’t know, but that water went to the middle of heaven, which is the place of all of the stellar bodies He created on day four.
Then on day three, in verses 9 to 13, He separated the dry land from the water on the earth creating then seas and land and then, two kinds of growing things, trees which produce fruit that has seed and plants which have their seed in themselves. That brings us to day four. Now we go back from the earth into heaven and He populates this vast expanse of heaven with the luminaries.
In day four, as verse 14 says, “Then God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens.” This is not some process that God initiated, this is something that God completed. He literally speaks it into existence. Listen to Psalm 33:6-9, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth all their hosts,” that is all the stars, moons, suns, comets and everything else that is there.
Verse 9 says, “For He spoke and it came to be; He commanded and it stood firm.” In other words, it didn’t change, it didn’t develop. He spoke it into existence and that’s the way it stayed, exactly the way He spoke it into existence. And the complexity of it literally is staggering. You would think stars are in the same place all the time. But they are moving. We can chart our courses by them, because they appear to be static.
But our own sun is taking our entire solar system and dragging it from one end of the universe to the other in an orbit that is huge. In fact the whole Milky Way Galaxy is in an orbit that scientists calculate takes 225 million years to complete. And everything else is also in corresponding orbits. The whole thing is incredible. And it all is doing now exactly what God designed it to do and created it to do in a simple word.
God created light, light is not created by stars. Light is not created by the sun. Light is simply created by God and attached to those luminaries. So we have the creation of light in verse 1, which identifies day and night and the evening and the morning and the first 24 hour solar day, and it’s now that same light for that same purpose, attached to these heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars that are identified down in verse 16.
Now the creation of light on day four does produce an important issue because light was already shining. People say, you can’t have light shining all over the place without stars, without a sun, because the light we know comes from those sources. How could God created plants on day three and a sun on day four? Because photosynthesis which is critical to the life of plants doesn’t exist apart from the sun.
But there was light already on day one. And where there is light there is heat. And where there is light and heat there is photosynthesis. The requisite conditions for plant life to survive on day three were already in existence because light was already there doing what light always does. The source just hadn’t been specifically explained. God is the creator of light. So, He took the light and attached it to the luminaries he made on day four.
Now darkness already was in existence, we know that back in verse 1. Light came into existence also on day one, so it was already in existence. This affirms that the day existed without the sun, and night existed without the moon and without the stars. Again, the sun is not the cause of daylight because there had already been three periods of daylight and three periods of dark before day four.
But God created these bearers of light and gave to them the task of separation and now, from our standpoint, it is the sun that brings us the light during the day, and the moon that brings us light at night, along with the stars. The first purpose then of these luminaries was to separate the day from the night, or to create a day as we know it, a 24-hour day. The second thing was to dominate.
Verse 14 continues, “And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.” The verb here, let them be, means let them serve. They were signs pointing to seasons and days and years. That is to say, these stellar bodies would divide the year into seasons and they would divide time, into seasons and into days and years. So you have seasonal times as well as calendar times.
So God created the sun and it dominates life on the earth. Along with the moon it determines the seasons. It determines the calendar year. They dictate to us when we work and when we rest. It is the rotation of the earth on its axis that determined the 24-hour day. It is the rotation of the moon’s orbit around the earth that determines the month. And the earth’s rotation around the sun determines the year.
And across the face of the earth, mankind lives by weeks. Where do you think they got that? Out of Genesis 1. That was the period of time in which God created the universe. So days and years are respectively the shortest and longest measures of time that are fixed by the movement of the sun and the moon. And within the framework of these days and years, the sun and the moon also affect the seasons.
Some people really get carried away and see in the stars some astrological signs. Our culture believes that there is some kind of zodiac and that these stars are actually powers that have a great impact on people’s lives. That is pagan and unbiblical. It is ridiculous at best, it is demonic at worst. And even some Christian teachers believe these signs.
Verse 15 says, “And let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so.” This is a technical phrase and it means, it was made permanent. It means in Hebrew that creation was a firm, fixed and established condition. Look at verse 16, “And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.”
The most popular theory is that our solar system formed from a cloud of swirling gas, dust, and particles. And if that is true then the planets in our solar system and the 63 moons must have evolved from the same material, right? Well, they don’t. About 98 percent of the sun is hydrogen or helium, but less than 1 percent of these planets are hydrogen and helium. There is no natural process that could form stars.
Psalm 8, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. 2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. 3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him.”
God gave us the account of creation so we would praise him such as is done in Psalm 8. And what does the evolutionist do? They rob God of His glory. They ought to be falling on their faces, oh Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. And wonder of wonders, you care about us. You care enough to love us, to send a savior to forgive our sins and to bring us to eternal glory. That’s the right response to Genesis 1.
God understands everything about you. There is as much glory in the immensity and the complexity of the creation of your body as there is in the complexity and the creation of the universe. Everywhere you look, you see His majesty on display, anything less than a life of worship is an affront to God punishable by an eternity in hell. But He is merciful and loving and He proved that through Jesus Christ who died for us. Let us pray.