Vast Nuclear Furnace

Our sun:  "a vast nuclear furnace rolling through trackless space, warping space-time around it and thus holding earth captive in its orbit and bathed in its light and heat."  

Love this quote by  Lennox explaining that it was the "divine mind" of Jesus that conceived of this light source.  "It was his idea" he continues, "to put the source of light outside the world on which he would later place his supreme creation, men and women made in his image."

John C. Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World, 2011

Light before sun? Another vote for function

According to another OT professor, C John Collins of Covenant Theological Seminary, the word customarily translated made in Genesis 1:16 can also mean appointed or working on something that is already in existence.  Lennox notes that this fits with the functional point of view, particularly when we see that the next verse explains the purpose of these bodies of light.  In Seven Days that Changed the World, Lennox says, "Those 'lights' help humans find their place and time in space-time.  It is surely the purpose of the sun, moon, and stars that is being emphasized in day 4, not how and when they came into being."  Ok!

Sources note:  Clearly, I'm a fan of Oxford mathematician John Lennox, even though he is critical of another scholar I highly respect, John Walton.  It's Walton who puts forth the functional creation model.  I'm happy to say that on this issue of the sun being on day 4 while light is on day 1, the two seem to agree.  :-]

What Putty said, 2 of 2

God brought all the wild animals and the birds of the sky "to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name," Genesis 2.18  NIV.

Putty points out the significance of God inviting a human to do the naming here at the end of the second three days of creation, the days which filled up the structures created to support life.  No small privilege!  No small task either.

But even given this esteemed position, we see in Genesis 2 man's failure.  Temptation comes.  Disobedience follows.  The beautiful world created for the creatures made in God's image is ruined by those very same creatures and sin enters the story.  

Then Putty makes an interesting comparison.  Just as darkness and chaos had been the originating state in the natural order (Genesis 1.2), so darkness and chaos return in the spiritual order with human sin.  And just as the natural realm needed God's light and order, so now the question becomes how God will bring light and order to the spiritual darkness, the fractured image that brings death, war, poverty, and the struggle to remain faithful to God.

Answer:  Jesus.  In the fullness of time Jesus comes and God begins to re-institute the creation process as he again separates and calls out his kingdom.  And he again invites us to join him.  As we are made new creations through Christ, we can begin to redemptively change the world.

What Putty said

I never cease to be amazed at the mysteries the Bible holds.  I have read Genesis 1 dozens of times recently, and yet I never noticed what Champaign Vineyard pastor Putty, who by the way has a UI doctorate in physics, pointed out last Sunday.  He started with Genesis 1 to get to the point that God made us with a desire to change the world.  This is the first of two parts of how Putty got to that assertion from the creation story.

The initial status of creation, verse 2, before day 1, is formless, chaotic, and dark.  With heaven and earth in this chaotic, empty state, God begins his work of separating, ordering, bringing the chaos under his control.  Putty points out that the first three days God divides things, putting together the structure needed to hold life.  In each of these three days God separates two things and then he names something.

Day 1 God separates light from darkness, and in verse 5 God calls the light "day."
Day 2 God separates the water above from the water below the vault, and in verse 8 God calls the vault "sky."
Day 3 God separates the water from the dry land, and in verse 10 God calls the dry ground "land," and he calls the waters "seas."  NIV

In that culture, being able to name something had profound implications. In the Hebrew mind, says Putty, naming is a last step of creation.

The final three days of creation, God fills the structures he made in the first three days.  He fills the day and night with sun, moon and stars; he fills the sea and sky with birds, fish and sea creatures; he fills the earth with animals and people.  But God does not name anything on these days.

Here God does something unexpected.  He had created the life, but at the end of chapter 1 he gives man the authority to rule over it.  Humankind is the climactic creation, made in God's own image.  In Genesis 2, God invites man to join him in the process of creation:  he gives man the task of naming the animals.  "Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name," Genesis 2.18  NIV.

More to come.

Light before sun? Explanation 4: God!

5This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you:  God is Light; in him there is no darkness at all.  I John 1.5  NIV  

Now we come to the most supernatural conclusion:  God is light!  If God is present and chooses to manifest it, his light is adequate and no external source, such as a ball of fire in the sky, is necessary.

In ancient times, I read, there was no distinction between what was natural and what was supernatural.  Why?  Because everything was seen as supernatural, the work of the gods.  Preceding development of the scientific method by long ages, what was known then was known by observation.  What was assumed then, as seen from writings, is that gods were behind physical phenomena.  

So, could God have provided light before he provided the sun?  Undoubtedly.  He is God after all.

But did God provide light before he provided the sun?  Maybe not.  He seems to like to work through natural means rather than constantly wowing us with his power.

It's something to think about.

Light before sun? Explanation 3: Vapor Canopy--not

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. Genesis 1.14-15 NIV

Oops.  I was thinking that young earth creationist John Whitcomb argued for a water vapor canopy that blocked the sun from the earth from day 1 to day 4 of creation.  Apparently I misunderstood.  It seems the canopy theory was rather to explain the Genesis flood.  It further seems that this theory has now been largely abandoned even by its former proponents. My mistake.

In looking for canopy information though, I found an on-line encyclopedia with over 8,000 articles developed by and for young earth creationists:  creationwiki.org.  Here are a few other ideas mentioned, not necessarily accepted, in the First Light entry of creationwiki.org.

Invention vs. Application

Some interpret the activities on day one to be those of an inventor who developed the reactions to produce light. Then on day 4 that invention was applied to the creation of the solar bodies that provide light today.

Universe Was Filled With Light

Cosmologists working with 'Big Bang' calculations indicate that a massive presence of photons would have crossed the entirety of the universe during the initial seconds of universal expansion. This would in fact have 'lit up' the entire universe, all at once. "...and there was light."

Sonoluminescence

Sonoluminescence is the process by which acoustic energy is turned into light. This is done by introducing a frequency to water while a air bubble is present. The light produced actually comes from this bubble. Light could have been accomplished this way during the creation week when the earth was just a sphere of water before land appeared.

Light before sun? Explanation 2: Function.

14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night . . . . 19And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.  Genesis 1:14, 19  NIV

John Walton, Old Testament and textual scholar at Wheaton College, is known for his proposition that the the account in Genesis 1 is a description of God's ascribing function to the material world rather than God's creation of the material world.  That God did create the world, Walton has no doubt; however, he says that material creation is not the story available to us.  What we have in the Bible's first chapters is the telling of how God prepared a world for humans by taking the material in its chaotic state—tohu wabohu—and giving it function to suit the needs of humankind.  Walton has come to believe this from his study of other writings from the Ancient Near East (ANE).

Genesis tells of a time so far back in primeval history that we can barely conceive of it.  Consider this:  who would understand current American culture better, students in Turkey, for example, today, or native youth on the North American continent itself in the 1400s?  An extended time period is more of a barrier than the location, right?

You and I come to the Bible out of touch with both the time and the place of its writing.  Other ANE cultures are comparatively similar in both.  As such, they can teach us something about how biblical writers see the world.  While Genesis, as already mentioned, is quite different from the creation stories of these nearby cultures--one all powerful God vs. a lot of minor warring gods--it is nonetheless similar in seeing creation as functional not material.  Days 1 to 3, Walton asserts, establish functions, and days 4 to 6 install functionaries.  Read chapter 1 again with this in mind and see if you can see it.  For those who can accept this point of view, the sun showing up on day 4 is no issue.

Source:  The Lost World of Genesis One:  Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, by John H. Walton, IVP Academic, 2009.