Light Shines Into The Darkness

Well, take your Bibles this morning and turn with me to Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 1, we're getting out of verse 2 today, so good news for those of you who like to see demonstrable progress, we are moving. Entitled this morning's message, Light Shines into the Darkness. Light shines into the darkness.

I want to remind you of one of the central points from last week's message, namely that it is a privilege that you have that you get to read the Bible. It is a privilege that you have God's revelation of Himself to creation. And it's true that part of being a creature means we get to understand wonderful things through scientific discovery.

I mean, marvelous, wonderful things. We learn about the magnitude of creation through science, and yet creation only reveals so much about God. In fact, we could say this, general revelation, creation itself testifies to the existence of God, but it's really relatively limited by design in what it tells us about God.

Essentially, you can learn minimally about your Creator by observing creation. You can learn that He exists. You can learn by looking at creation that He's eternal.

You can learn that He has power, great power. But beyond that, you can't learn what you need to know about God merely through observation of creation. And so, science, as wonderful as it is in helping us understand our creation that we live, the creation that we live and be a part of, it's only limited in its ability to help us understand our Creator.

For example, through science, it's possible to observe that order exists in the universe. Science cannot tell you why there is order in the universe or how it is that that order first came to be. Science cannot explain the purpose of life, why you're here, can't explain morality, why there would be such a thing as right and wrong, or why human beings possess a conscience.

And in fact, science can't even explain how anything came to exist in the first place. In fact, when I read the explanations of spontaneous generation, I'm just staggered. You know that you're just going to have these disorganized, random particulates that suddenly come together and do a living thing.

And so, we appreciate science and that it teaches us about creation and we learn and make wonderful discoveries. And yet, it cannot answer the fundamental and essential issues of life. In order to understand those, we need somebody to tell us about them.

We need special revelation. That's what theologians would call this, special revelation. By that, what we mean to say is we need God to speak to us and to tell us specifically about these realities.

Psalm 19 puts both of these side by side. The heavens are declaring the glory of God. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night pours forth knowledge.

Creation testifies to God's existence. Then David goes on later in that psalm and he begins to talk about special revelation, the things that can only take place when God's Word goes forth and He speaks directly to His creatures. And so, when we come to Genesis 1, this is exactly what we find.

This is special revelation. This is God introducing Himself to the world and speaking so that we might understand Him. My brothers and sisters, we already said this, but Genesis 1, grammatically speaking, has one subject.

There's only one actor who is doing throughout the entire chapter, and it is ever and always the Almighty God. Everything else in the chapter is an object. It's being acted upon by the subject, which is God Himself.

And so, the resounding message of Genesis 1 is that you and I are to direct all of our adoration and our praise, our homage, our fear to the Almighty God, the Creator of heaven and earth. Genesis 1, 1 begins, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.

God called the light day and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning the first day. I mean, this is how it all started.

As we looked at a couple of weeks ago in verse 1, when we read, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, we're recognizing the aseity of God, that is to say, His self-existence. That before anything else was, God always was. He's the one who was and is and is to come.

And we saw that this is incomprehensible for our brains because everything that we know has a beginning. It has an origin. And yet, God is eternal, so He has no origin.

He is everlasting. And we saw that as God creates, this is ex nihilo, this is out of nothing. It's categorically different from any creating that you and I might do.

So as humans, we saw, we make things, we form things, we invent things, we put things together. And yet, in this type of category, to actually produce and create something out of nothing, God alone does this. And so we come face-to-face in Genesis 1-1 with the reality that there's two categories that exist in the universe, that which is uncreated, namely God Himself, and everything else that's in the category of that which was created.

Again, I just, every time I go back and reflect on this, I marvel at it because I have to admit, I care way too much about created things. I trust far too much in myself and in other people. And so to come face-to-face with the one who's uncreated is to see the folly of fearing man and the folly of trusting in man and the folly of worshiping people and possessions and power and prominence, because you realize all of those things at the end of the day are temporary.

They have a Genesis in the Creator who began them. And so Genesis 1-1 just produces worship in our hearts, to turn from worshiping that which is created to worshiping the Creator. Moses goes on in verse 2, and he says, The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

And so here we recognize that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and now we're beginning to see in verse 2 what that original creation looked like, and we see that the earth was uncultivated. It was a desolate place. It was a wilderness.

It was not yet suitable for life. It hadn't yet been prepared for plants and animals and people. And so in that sense, the earth, when it was first created, was useless.

And that's really this idea of void. The earth was useless when it started. And you say, man, that sounds a little judgy to say that the earth was useless.

Well, here's how I can see to this. Does anybody remember Pluto? When I was a kid, Pluto was still a planet, and then it was like 2006, suddenly it gets demoted, and it's no longer a planet. But when I grew up, Pluto was considered a planet, okay? But I do have a question for you.

What is Pluto good for? Not a whole lot. I mean, you can't live there. It's not really helping anyone.

You can't grow things. You can't live there. It's there, but it's not really useful.

In fact, if something happened to Pluto, I don't care. So when the earth started, it was not a place that you could live. That's why it was void.

That's why the scriptures say it was without form. It was still covered in water. We don't totally understand all that was in play there, but it was not yet suitable for human life.

And sometimes what happens is people come to the scriptures, and they read this, and they get to verse 2, and they make one of two errors, and so I just want to briefly address those, and then we'll get to verse 3. We'll start to make some further progress here. The first issue relates to the status of the earth. So sometimes people read this verse, and they read the earth was without form and void, and they start to begin to think here that the earth has already fallen in some way.

There's a theologian that came up with this idea that first asserted the conjecture, and then it's kind of picked up steam over the years. The notion went something like this. God created the heavens and the earth, verse 1, then Satan and the angels fell between verse 1 and verse 2. So now in verse 2, you have an earth that's pretty messed up.

It's in chaos. And so now God has got to come along and kind of recreate and refashion, almost like a stutter step along the way. I'd say this view is problematic.

Certainly, the text doesn't say that the earth is in chaos. Rather, it's just in its first form. It's embryonic still.

And there's no mention of the fall. Obviously, sin brings death, and so we don't want to insert that reading into the text here. But part of where this idea came from is because this idea of being without form and void appears elsewhere in Scripture.

It appears in the prophets. When the prophets speak of the earth in particular being without form and void, it's actually in the context of judgment. Listen to the words of Jeremiah, the prophet Jeremiah, who's using the same language Moses is here.

He writes in Jeremiah 4, 23, What is it that Jeremiah is referring to here? Well, he's talking about the day of the Lord when God comes and he judges the earth. And in that day, in the context of Jeremiah 4, mountains are quaking, birds are fleeing, cities are falling. It's disaster upon disaster that's happening on the earth.

There's devastation throughout the land. And in that, the earth becomes desolate, and it becomes void. And so sometimes people would come and they would say, You know what? Here we have in the Bible, the earth being without form and void in the context of judgment.

And so in verse 2, Moses must be talking about judgment. I want to give you a better explanation, what I believe is the right understanding of this passage. God has not judged the earth in verse 2. He's begun creation.

He's roughed in the formation of the earth. It's without form yet. It's not suitable for human life.

When Jeremiah comes and he speaks later of God pouring out judgment on the earth in the day of the Lord, the earth is returning to that which is without form and void. So you understand when God judges this terrestrial globe one day, what's going to be happening is an undoing of creation, so to speak. It's going to be God de-creating the earth.

There's no fall yet in Genesis 1-2. There's no sin. There's no judgment.

Rather, the judgment is going to be to return the earth to its uninhabitable condition. At that point, it might as well be Pluto again. The writer of Hebrews spoke of this and said in Hebrews 1, You, O Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of Your hands.

You did all of this, Lord. They will perish. The earth is going to perish.

But You, unlike them, will remain. They will wear out like a garment. It's like when you start to get holes in your clothes.

I'm actually old enough. I've stopped growing long enough that my clothes wear out. When you're little, you have to get new clothes every year because you're growing, so you don't really wear clothes out.

You can wear a shirt long enough that it wears out. It gets really comfortable along the way. The writer of Hebrews is saying this earth is like a garment.

It doesn't last forever. It's going to be rolled up just like a robe, and it's going to be changed. So when you read in Genesis 1-2 that the earth was without form and void, this is still the initial creation.

There's no fall. There's no sin. There's no fallen creatures.

This primordial state is just the beginning of creation, and this uninhabitable condition is that to which the earth is one day going to be returned. Second issue relates to timing. Second issue relates to timing.

It's postulated in the 1800s by a theologian that between verse 1 and verse 2, there exists what is called a gap. This gap was posited to be millions of years. Depending on who you talk to, it might be billions of years.

Essentially, they would say the reading goes like this. Thesis statement. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

That's kind of just the thesis over the whole thing. Hard stop. Then we come back and we find the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.

And so there's this idea that there's now a gap that exists in creation, a long passage of time. If I could just say that in the original, how this reads is in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and then the connective tissue, the grammar between those two verses would indicate now that verse 2 is simply explaining what things looked like at verse 1. So when God created the heavens and the earth, here's how it looked. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

You get to verse 3, and God said, let there be light, and this is a continued progression. How did that theologian come to this conclusion? Well, it wasn't through careful Bible study. Rather, he had come to understand that scientific observation had begun to conclude that the earth was older than what it initially seemed or appeared to be in the Genesis account, and therefore he was trying to find a way without apparently contradicting the text itself to make room in space for a greater length of time.

That's an over-reliance, an over-trust in human ability to see and discern and conclude things from creation around us. And so there is no gap between Genesis 1 and 2, verse 1 and 2, or between verse 2 and 3. And so when we get to verse 3 here, we have God creating and bringing into existence light. Okay, this is the first thing that we see from this text is God now makes light.

Verse 3 reads, and God said, let there be light, and there was light. Just take that in for a moment. God speaks into darkness, and he brings forth light.

Brings up an interesting question. Why start with darkness? Well, darkness, as we come to know it, is simply the absence of light. Darkness is the absence of light.

And so starting with creation in darkness enables God to now introduce light into his creation. And so God says, let there be light, and there is light. Now, somewhat axiomatic that we need light.

As a creature, you benefit from light. Even little children understand the difference between light and dark. We can just finish the sentence.

Little kids are commonly afraid of what? The dark. They're not afraid of the light. They even understand the concept of turning the lights on, turning the lights off.

And yet light itself is remarkably complex. Very simply, it's electromagnetic radiation that can be detected with the human eye. And light has a broad spectrum of wavelengths from gamma rays to radio waves.

In fact, as humans, we only see a narrow band of light, so there's a lot of light that you can't see. These are terms that you might be familiar with, such as infrared light and ultraviolet light. We only see part of the spectrum of light.

One encyclopedia humbly admits with regard to light this, no simple answer to the question, what is light, satisfies the many contexts in which light is experienced, explored, and exploited. The physicist is interested in the physical properties of light. The artist in an aesthetic appreciation of the visual world.

Through the sense of light, light is a primary tool for perceiving the world and communicating with it. Light from the sun warms the earth, drives global weather patterns, and initiates the life-sustaining process of photosynthesis. Goes on to write that essentially on the grandest scale, discovery is not even possible apart from light.

And then when we try to describe and define and categorize light, it gets challenging. We find that there's limitations. Light has a dual nature that is not correctly or fully described by the classical wave model or the classical particle model.

Rather, there's a dual nature in light that is revealed in quantum mechanics. Light is a bit beyond us to fully take in and comprehend and understand even as creatures, and yet we understand that light is necessary for life. And so we come to Genesis 1, verse 3. As God speaks into His creation, the first act now after creating the heavens and the earth is God speaks and He brings forth light.

Now, you might be thinking at this moment, why didn't He just make the sun? Why didn't He just make the sun? I mean, I grew up in church. I grew up in Sunday school. We had flannel graphs.

If you didn't grow up in the church, a flannel graph is a board covered with flannel that Sunday school teachers use to teach children. They have Ziploc baggies filled with pieces of felt that stick to the flannel. And so as they tell the Bible story, they just have all these convenient pictures to kind of help keep kids' attention.

And so I remember flannel graphs being a significant part of my childhood and going over the days of creation. And childlike faith, you just don't question things. So day one, God said there's light and there's light.

Okay, that's cool. Day four, God created the sun. Makes sense to me.

I mean, there's just no questioning that at all for probably past the point where I should have started questioning it. But why is it that God would create light before He would make the sun? It's an important question. The text doesn't say, but as you read the rest of the Scriptures, I think we start to get some clues.

I'd say the best educated guess is this. God Himself is the source and the origin of all light, not the sun. God Himself is the source and the origin of all light, not the sun.

See, the existence of light apart from the sun tells us that light doesn't come from the sun. It ultimately comes from God, the one who made the sun. It testifies that we don't worship the sun.

We worship the God who made the sun. And then you start remembering all of your history classes and you start thinking about the peoples over time who've worshipped the sun. Ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, Incas, the Mesopotamians, including the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the Greeks and the Romans, the ancient Germanic peoples, Hindus, Mayans, various Native American tribes, Persians, Celts, and Druids.

It's not even a comprehensive list. So now you have the creature worshipping that which has been created, namely the sun. Genesis 1-3 comes and it testifies don't worship the sun, worship the source of light, which is God himself.

It's obvious why people would be impressed by the sun. It is the largest object in our solar system. In fact, you could fit 1.3 million Earths inside of the sun.

And it possesses tremendous energy. It's an estimated 15 million degrees Celsius at its core. Okay, just a couple things to think about there.

First of all, I don't know Celsius very well, so that's always not helpful. Number two, I can't even fathom 15 million degrees, even if it's Fahrenheit. And then my third question is, how do you know? I mean, I know there's some kind of a mathematical model.

Do you know how close we can get to the sun? The NASA solar orbiter came out in 2020, was gonna get us close to the sun, okay? Closer than we've ever been. How close? 42 million kilometers. Now, maybe you don't know what a kilometer is.

Doesn't matter. It's a long way away from the sun. Now, ancient worshipers didn't know any of those things.

Not in the level of detail that we know them now. But they knew that they needed the sun's light. They knew that they needed the sun to make things grow.

They knew that they needed heat that the sun would produce. They knew that the Earth was dependent upon sunshine. They understood that daybreak would come, and it was separated from the night, and so they worshipped this amazing flaming ball of gases in the heavens above.

And Genesis 1 puts creation on notice by saying, as impressive and as incomprehensible as the sun may be, don't worship the sun. Worship the God who brought it into existence, the one who sustains the sun. Worship the God who brought about light even before the sun came into being.

And so this is marvelous. This creative act is absolutely wonderful. I think logically it does make sense.

If you were gonna produce a musical instrument, it would make sense that first you would produce music, then the instrument. So here God produces light apart from the sun. How did he do it? Verse 3, God said, let there be light, and there was light.

I mean, do not let that get old to you. Don't let the familiarity of the story and the words just become something that you can unthinkingly take in and not stop and consider the wonder of. He spoke, and it came into existence.

Psalm 33 6, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host. Psalm 33 9, he spoke, and it came to be. He commanded, and it stood firm.

I mean, this is God expressing his will through verbal communication, and what he wants happens. One commentator writes this. By saying, let there be, God was expressing his will.

And so here, at the beginning of the Bible, we learn a lesson. Okay, what's the lesson? God's will is the creative and determining power of all there is and will be. We ask the question whether God is able to accomplish whatever he will.

The answer is that it was his will that in the first place he created all things, causing even the first brilliant rays of light to shine. God's will is a sovereign creative power enforced by the word of his command. And whatever God's word declares to be his will, whether it is a promise of salvation or a warning of dire judgment, we may be absolutely certain that his will will be done.

I mean, right here it testifies. God says, let there be light, and there was light. And so every time God speaks, he's revealing his will.

It will be accomplished. And as that pastor rightly said, whether we're talking about salvation or the warning of judgment, this is what it means when God speaks, when he makes a promise or he gives a warning. And not only that, but as God speaks, he's starting to let us in on who he is.

He's revealing himself. I mean, do you understand? He didn't need to speak it. All he had to do was want it to happen, and it would have happened.

It's significant that God here is a speaking God from the outset. He's a communicative God. He's a God who reveals things.

He's not a silent God. Rather, he may be known because he chose to make himself known by speaking, and we see that first here in this text. I mean, I just, I came to this, and I just had to ask myself, do I treasure the words of God in an appropriate manner in light of this verse? No surprise, the answer is no.

I don't treasure the word like that. I mean, and I know all of the things about God's word. It's living and active.

It's powerful. It doesn't return void without accomplishing the purpose for which he intended. It causes us to be born again to a living hope.

But you come here to Genesis 1-3, and you realize the divine intention and the divine power contained in the very words of God. You say, well, that should inform my quiet time tomorrow when I open the Scriptures to see that I'm not just interacting with words on a page. I'm interacting with truth from God that can do things for me and inside of me that can't be done by any other mechanism.

I can't fix what's wrong with my soul, but God can, and by his word, he does. I can't make someone who doesn't believe the gospel believe the gospel, but I can speak truth, and I know that the very proclamation of truth, that gospel message, is the power of God unto salvation. And so I would say that when you see the power of God on display here in this creative action by speaking, let it inform you.

Let it inform the way you engage with your Bible this week for your own spiritual needs, for ministering to others, to view it as containing this kind of divine power. God said, he spoke a word, let there be light, and there was light. In verse 4, God saw that the light was good.

So he speaks light into existence, scriptures don't teach us whether it was emanating from him or what the exact light source was, but God sees what he just made. Text says he saw it, so he speaks, it goes forward, now he sees it, and he says, that's good. Implication, it delights me to see what I just did.

I am pleased with what I just made. I mean, God takes pleasure in his own handiwork. It's like a great artist who upon completing a masterpiece puts down the paintbrush and just steps back and takes it all in and says, man, I did a really good job.

See, light is something that is good, and in fact, as we will see, the Hebrews were just starting to get a taste for this when Genesis was written. We have the full revelation of God, and so we see light traced throughout Scripture. To understand the themes that God is the giver of light is giving something good to his people.

Light is always characterized in Scripture as being something good. Natural light is good, spiritual light is good. David would say in Psalm 1829, For Lord, it is you who light my lamp, the Lord my God lightens my darkness.

If you remember the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6, the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Throughout Scripture, light is good, always.

And so here, God creates light, and he steps back and he just says, that thing that I just made is good. Now, that's going to be a refrain throughout Genesis 1. We're going to see it over and over. It's going to help orient our perspective around creation.

And so God creates this good gift for humanity that's going to be necessary for their lives. And we read that God did not have a purpose to have everything be light all the time, but rather for there to be in his universe both light and dark. And so we read, and God separated the light from the darkness.

He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, verse 5, and the darkness he called night. And so right here, day one of creation, here's the earth.

Part of the earth is light, and part of the earth is dark. Now, I know what you're wondering, is the earth spinning right now? Well, yes, it is right now. Is it spinning right now in Genesis 1, verse 5? I don't know.

I like to think it probably was. I have no idea. May have been spinning, may have not been spinning.

Just a quick side note, no extra charge here. People get jammed up in the creation account because they say that would defy natural laws. I just remind you that throughout Scripture, God is defying natural laws.

And every time you read of a miracle in Scripture, God is defying natural laws. The creation itself was a miracle, and so I just don't get jammed up. If something seems like possibly God violated one of his natural laws in creation, to think, well, that actually seems pretty much expected.

Okay? So the earth is here. God separates the light from the darkness. What that means is part of the earth right now is light, and part of the earth is dark.

So we don't know what this light was sourced in. We don't know how far away it was from the earth. We don't know if God just flicked it on or if it would have traveled at the normal speed of light.

Light, as you know, moves very, very fast, 186,000 miles per second. It means that as far away as the sun is from us, if it were to go out right now, we wouldn't know about it for like over 8 minutes. Okay? So maybe it went out right now, and in 8 minutes, lights are gonna go out, we're done.

Who knows? You wouldn't know because that's how far away we are. Light travels at that speed, 186,000 miles per second. We don't know whether God turned on a light and it took time to travel to the earth or whether it was instantaneous.

But at this point, God now has begun to bring form to creation. And in this form, he has now said, day and night. Day and night.

I want you to understand that this is how things are. Day and night is the reality that everyone on earth lives in. It's inescapable that day and night exist.

He put it in place here at the first day of creation and it abides to this day. And as he does this, we see authority. Look at verse 5. God called the light day and the darkness he called night.

Okay? He had the naming rights. We talk about naming rights today. Usually we mean something different when we say naming rights.

When we say naming rights, that's usually given to someone who has purchased the right to name something. We have a building project coming up. Let's say Skip and Terry Hamilton say we want to pay for the entire sanctuary.

Okay? We're just going to write a check for it. Whatever you need. Two million, two and a half million.

We'll build the sanctuary. But for that, we want to have naming rights. Okay? So that when everyone comes in, what they see is not Cornerstone Bible Church, but the Skip and Terry Hamilton sanctuary.

Okay? Far-fetched, I know, on multiple levels. Okay? That would be naming rights. The thought would be you purchased the right to name something.

And if you go on a college campus, you see it all over the place. If you go to a sports complex, you see it. You paid for the right to name something because there's a sense of authority behind that.

Well, the picture here is that God is the one who invented day and night. And so he gets to choose what it's going to be called. He has the authority.

He has naming rights. And so he says the light time is called day and the dark time is called night. And that's, that's what it is.

These are his divine authority. He separates the day from the night. He names each one.

And then we see there was evening and there was morning the first day. There was evening and there was morning the first day. Now this is a very important clause.

It's a very important clause because it's, it's indicating that this idea of days in Genesis 1 is not incidental. It's not superfluous information. It's not even implied.

It's being made explicit. If you were just to read Genesis 1, as we talked about last week, what you're hearing resounded and obvious and plain as a central point of focus is the separation of created works into individual days. And then those days even being modified by numeration, day one, day two, day three, and so on, and then further amplified by saying things like there was evening and there was morning the first day.

What is evening? Well, evening is sunset. Evening is sunset, twilight. It's when the sun goes down.

Sunrise would be the morning, also known as daybreak or dawn. This is universal, okay? Transcends people groups, transcends eras. Any point in history, morning kicks off the day, and then the day ends when the sun goes down.

Obviously you have people who work at night and things like that, but there's, there's no society that inverts that and says daytime is nighttime and nighttime is daytime. Or we're gonna measure days some totally different way. You know what? I'm on a different plan.

I'm not gonna have seven cycles a week where I wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep. I'm gonna have 11 cycles. You can't do that.

The rules are set that there's a 24-hour day separated by day and night. Daybreak or morning kicks off the day and evening closes it out. And even throughout Genesis, of course, we'll see over and over as we go, things happening in the morning when light begins, things happening in the evening when the day is done.

Now, whenever we come to this kind of language, there's, there's people that can get a little bit, a little bit bound up, okay? A little bit, a little bit jammed up on the language here, and here's kind of how this line of thinking goes. I wanna be able to trust the Bible, but I think when the Bible talks about scientific realities, it's, it's a little bit inaccurate because when you say sunrise, that is not scientifically accurate. Um, the Earth is actually the one that's moving around the sun.

The Earth is spinning, and so it appears to us as the sun rising or the sun setting isn't the sun doing anything. The sun is fixed. Really what's happening is the Earth is, is spinning and we're turning away from the sun or we're turning toward the sun.

So when the Bible says things like sunrise and sunset, it's just, it's inaccurate. And maybe perhaps the, the more obvious example that we hear of is in Joshua when we read that the sun stood still. They say, see that? I mean, that's just, just garbage.

The sun was always fixed. The Earth is the one moving, and so the Bible is not reliable when it speaks to scientific issues with scientific accuracy. Okay, you wanna, you wanna, a nice little word here to impress your friends with.

This is called phenomenological language. Okay, phenomenological language. What is that? Well, it's language that we use to describe our human vantage point.

And you do it all the time. Okay, say tonight you go home. You suddenly get hit with vertigo.

You're feeling dizzy. You cry out, help, the room is spinning. Someone comes in, they say, actually, that is scientifically inaccurate.

The room is staying in the same place. It is not spinning right now. Or maybe someone else says, man, it's been a crazy month, and you know what? Time has just been speeding up lately, and you're like, actually, that's impossible.

24-hour days, 365 days a year, see the Earth goes around the sun. The Earth is spinning. Time doesn't speed up.

To both of which we'd reply, we weren't making a statement of definitive scientific accuracy. All I meant was time actually just seems like it's moving really quickly right now. The room feels to me like it's spinning.

So it would be appropriate if you're on Earth, like everyone says, hey, did you see the sunrise this morning? And no one freaks out. It says, actually, could you just say, did you see this morning when the Earth spun so that we could now see the sun breaking over the horizon? You just call it sunrise, and you call it sunset. And so when we read morning and evening, the first day, that's what we're reading.

Same words for sunrise and sunset. I want you to understand that this is merely speaking from the vantage point of how us as creatures view reality, phenomenological language. Now, one more thing relating to the day here, and then I want to spend a few minutes just applying this message.

We talked last week about the use of the word day. We talked about how day in Scripture could be used to communicate a 24-hour period or an era, a length of time. Context is what tells us how to understand what usage the author intends when day is written in that particular context.

I just want to give you an illustration that I want to show you right here from Genesis how easily we can see this. Okay, if I say the word board, B-O-A-R-D, I could mean different things by that word. I could mean a fence board.

I could mean a corporate board. I could mean a common board. And sometimes when I would use the word board, it could be ambiguous.

So if I said, I'm sitting on a board, and you couldn't see me, you wouldn't know, is he talking about a corporate board or is he talking about a piece of wood? I don't know. But the next words before or after that would generally clear up the ambiguity by shedding additional light on what is meant. So if I said, I'm sitting on a board, and I think it has given me a sliver, you know I'm talking about I'm sitting on a piece of wood.

And if I said, I'm sitting on a board, but it's consuming too much time and energy, so I plan to retire this year, you know I'm talking about a corporate board. I didn't say it explicitly. You just understood the words around it.

Okay, I want to show you how right here, Moses uses day in three different ways, and each time you know exactly what he means. Okay, let's look at this. Genesis 1 verse 5, God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

What's that first use of day? Daytime versus nighttime. It's the day versus the night. We're just talking about the hours where the sun is up.

Phenomenological language, the sun is up. Second use of day, second part of verse 5, and there was evening and there was morning the first day. Okay, now we're talking about evening and morning.

What are we talking about? Well, we're talking about a day, a fixed point in time, 24 hours. Flip over to Genesis chapter 2 verse 4, one more example. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

What's being talked about there? Obviously the whole week, just referring to it as the day, the era, that time period. So what I want to show you here is that you're able to just simply in reading understand how it is that God is using day. And right here in chapter 1 verse 5, when he says there was evening and there was morning the first day, God has created the first 24-hour period in the history of the world.

I mean, I was just thinking about how amazing that is. We have lots of first days. There's even first days in the Bible.

There's the first day of the week. Jesus rose on Sunday, the first day of the week. We have the first day of the month that we read about, the first day of Passover, the first day of the year.

There's always a genitival phrase, the first day of something. You come here to Genesis 1-5 and it's just the first day. Because prior to this there had never been a day before.

This is day one. This is the first day of creation. You cannot look at this and come away and not marvel at the wonder of our God who designed things that today you and I take for granted.

And as I was reflecting on this opening day in creation where God speaks light into existence, He speaks into the darkness, I was just thinking about what it is that we are intended to take away from here. And the first lesson, of course, is the magnitude of God, the Creator, the fact that when He speaks His will comes about. The fact that He gives good gifts to His people and He's a good Creator and He sees that light is good.

But that's not all. This serves as a spiritual lesson for us. See, the Apostle Paul would say in 2 Corinthians 4 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.

God's not the one who merely speaks into existence physical light but He's the one who brings spiritual light. He's the God that spoke physical light into physical darkness. He brings spiritual light into spiritual darkness.

In fact, He Himself is light. John 1, 4, in Him was life and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

We're talking about spiritual darkness right now and spiritual light. John would continue in John chapter 3 and say the light has come into the world and people love the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. See, the same way that physical light exposes, spiritual light exposes.

See, when Jesus came as light of the world He comes and He exposes. He reveals. He takes what is otherwise hidden and He turns the lights on so that it can be seen.

And yet that's necessary for the healing process. You have to come to the light. You have to be exposed for who you are.

By nature we hate the light. We hate exposure of our sin. In fact, in that very text we read that men loved the darkness and they preferred rather to stay in the darkness than to come into the light because they didn't want their deeds to be exposed.

I don't know anybody who relishes exposure of sin in their life where they just get a thrill out of it, but I'll tell you what, every child of God longs to be in the light. They want fellowship with the light. They want to walk in the light.

They want their sin to be brought out into the light so that it can be cleansed and dealt with. And so, if this morning as you sit here today you've never come to the light, I would urge you don't remain preferring to live in darkness, come to Jesus and be saved. And if as you're sitting here this morning you would say, you know what, I love the light.

I've embraced the light. And I just want to leave you with the encouragement here from Genesis 1-3. The only reason why you ever received the light is because the God who spoke light into darkness shone the light of the glory of Jesus Christ upon your darkened heart.

See the creation here is a pattern it's a paradigm to teach us on day one of creation that our God is a God who speaks light into darkness. If you believe in Jesus, you believe in Him because God graciously brought the light to your heart. Will you pray with me? Lord in heaven we marvel at the wonder of what you did in creation.

We admit so much of this account is beyond us and yet we want to just take in all of the details and we want to know you better and grasp these realities. Father, I pray that you would cause there to be gratitude that stirs in our hearts or to reflect upon the fact that if we're in Christ it's not because we were so good at spotting things that we needed to see or we were so willing to have our deeds exposed but rather you were greater than our hearts and you caused us to be born again by a living hope and your very power that spoke light into darkness spoke into our very hearts. Lord thank you for the light I pray Lord that we would walk in the light as you were in the light or that we might enjoy fellowship with one another and the encouragement that your blood cleanses us from all of our sins.

We love you and we praise you. Amen.