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Let there be light

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw the light was good was good, and he 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.
(NIV Genesis 1:3-5)

Each morning and evening I encounter this verse and must come to an ever-deepening understanding of its meaning. And these verses are rich with meaning. The first aspect to consider is God speaking—throughout the Bible God is speaking. This reminds us of his omnipresence in our lives and when we combine this with natural events like morning and evening, we encounter a visceral moment where God is near ongoingly speaking order out of chaos, maintaining the balance between light and darkness.

This leads me to the next part, “let there be light”. This can easily be misunderstood as “sunlight” but the Sun does not get called into order until the 4th day. Instead this is God’s pervasive light—the light of illumination and spiritual goodness that pushes out the pull of darkness or spiritual blindness. Theologian J Vernon McGee (1991) has suggested in his biblical commentary on Genesis what God is ordering is earthly existence after the fall of Lucifer, after Lucifer descends into the earthly plane of existence. If this is correct, then when we look at these verses, we are seeing God ensure his dominion is established and reigns over the authority of the Accuser. As such, God’s creation is “good”—where good not only means acceptable, but morally good and righteous. The world God creates is one that at its core is a righteous world—all things to be spoken into order or created will be inherently righteous.

What does all this mean for us and our day-to-day lives where we are not dealing with great forces of chaos or asked to bring life into existence from nothingness? The first chapter of Genesis is about the context of our lives. It lays out the stage where our lives will unfold. We all living within the confines of light and dark, morning and evening. Yet we often forget the importance of these contexts. We tend to treat them as backdrops of our lives, often arriving and going invisible to us as we live out our own existence. Yet God was intentional in his creations and ordering of chaos. God is speaking through the natural world that we often ignore. Morning and evening are the reminders of the battle between God’s light, God’s goodness and the spiritual darkness that occurs when we rebel against the divine being at the center of the existence. When we fail to acknowledge the light of the morning, we find ourselves dwelling in the darkness of the evening. So next time morning and evening roll round, consider praying to acknowledge God’s gift of goodness and illumination and God’s capacity to hold the reigns of a darkness that would pervade over the whole of creation given a chance. Let us pray so that we will choose the light and goodness and reject our sin natures that rebel. Let us notice the morning, the day; let us notice the evening, the night.
Heavenly Father you are ever presence in my mornings and my evenings. Your goodness permeates within me as your light shines through. Each day, may I grow in awareness of your goodness and may I grow to be a righteous image of God. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

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