I went to the county jail yesterday afternoon with Ron Wright to have a Bible study with some men. After I taught and closed in prayer, a few of them came up to me with some questions. One asked, "If the sun, moon and stars weren't created until day 4 of Creation in Genesis 1, what does it mean that light was created on day 1?"Great question! I pointed out that God created everything with the appearance that it had been here for quite awhile. If you had shown up 5 minutes after Adam was created, you would have sworn that he had been alive for at least 2 or 3 decades. (After all, God didn't create Adam as a baby that needed to grow up. He created Adam as a full grown man.) So, with Adam, we understand that God created him with the appearance that he had been around much longer than he actually had.
It is the same way with the rest of God's creation. If we believe in a young earth that is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old (which I do), how can we understand that we see the light coming from stars that are millions of light years from earth (traveling at the speed of light, it would take millions of years for that light to reach earth so that we can see the star). Again, I believe that God created everything with the appearance that it had been around for a long time. On Day 1 of creation, God created the light coming from light sources that did not exist until Day 4. In fact, we are told after God said, "Let there be light" that "the evening and the morning were the first day" (Genesis 1:5). The earth's rotation and the sun's light is what determines evenings and morning. Since the sun was not created for 3 more days, we must assume that on Day 1, God created light coming from a sun that wasn't yet created. It is in this way that we can explain earth's young history while still understanding how we can see light from stars and galaxies so far away.
No comments:
Post a Comment