Genesis 1:1-5
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.
Here are the points we should take note of from reading this passage:
- Darkness existed prior to creation
- God created the light
- God separated the light from the darkness
- God named the light Day and the darkness he named Night
- God saw that the light was good, but he says nothing regarding the darkness, which, though it does not imply the darkness is evil, certainly emphasizes that the darkness is “lacking good”
Darkest Darkness
While Day 1 may seem rather innocuous at first, the definitions of the underlying Hebrew words paint an entirely different picture. The first word is darkness, or choshek which is the same word that appears later in Exodus 10:21-29 during one of the plagues on Egypt. As a result of this darkness, “they did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days, but all the sons of Israel had light in their dwellings.” This verse comes from a time when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. But if the darkness were a natural darkness, then we would expect the Egyptians to have access to the same natural light sources as their slaves. Therefore, if the Israelites were getting natural light from candles, torches, and fire how much more would their masters have access to these sources! This scripture proves that the darkness, choshek was not a natural darkness at all for natural light sources could not dispel it, just as the light the Israelites had was not natural light at all, because the choshek could not overcome it.
This same darkness was on the face of the deep, which is tehom. Tehom is the Hebrew word for the abyss, where fallen spiritual beings dwell. So right away we have this supernatural darkness tied to the dwelling place of fallen spiritual beings. By creating light on Day 1, God is describing classic good and evil through the terms of light and darkness, along with the conflicts that go hand and hand with them.
But it is not until God creates Adam that we get our first look at darkness in the world. On Day 1 when God created light, He separated light from darkness, such that wherever light exists the darkness cannot. Likewise, before creating Adam, there was an absence of human life, but the moment that God formed Adam, the absence of human life co-existed simultaneously with Adam.
We read in Genesis 2:18 God remarking that, “it is not good that man should be alone.” Being alone is the absence of other human life, and for a brief moment, Adam co-existed with this reality until God created for him a helpmate through the woman, Eve. The moment God did this, the absence of human life that God found, “not good” was dispersed.
How Light is Made
The next form of darkness is typically more formidable a problem for human-invented gods to overcome. Man-made gods tend to snap their fingers granting free will upon their creations, but how can your will be truly free when the only options availed are those your creator has provided? The fundamental problem with the nature of an omnipotent being is that he always gets what he wills. That makes creating a being capable of choosing against God’s will impossible. God cannot will into His creations the capacity to choose against him, as it would introduce a paradox. When we recognize that obedience is righteousness and disobedience is sin, then to formulate this paradox would require Adam to obediently disobey. To obey God, Adam would to have to sin because he does not have a choice whether he wants to be righteous, thus making Adam’s “sin” his “righteousness.”
At least, that is the case if you are a false god that does not know what he is doing. The God of the Bible demonstrates an awareness of this fundamental problem and introduces the vehicle through which he gifts free will to his creations.
First, God makes something good, say a fruit tree. The tree is good, because God has made it, and God only makes the things God likes, thus this makes the tree good. Now because God’s creations are good things, they are also desirable. That gives his living creations the motivation to want them, but this is not the same overpowering want as a starving man, it is simply the inclination to share similar approval as that of his creator.
The final piece of the puzzle is through the spoken word given in the form of a command. By telling Adam that he could not eat from the fruit tree, God was establishing a boundary for Adam. No similar prohibition was given to the other fruit-eating creatures, thus there existed no reason they could not eat from this tree themselves; scripture shows that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden to Adam alone. In giving that command, Adam now had two directives: the first one to naturally imitate His creator’s desire for all the good things He made, and the second good one, to obey everything his creator told him.
In the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam thus had two good choices competing against one another; because God had created the natural inclination and the command given, these two drives were held in perfect balance. The only thing that could tip that balance would be the puny, insignificant, inclination of man himself. Put another way, “I want to eat the fruit, but I want to obey God.”
We can know with a high degree of certainty that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil possessed no special physical property, because God would not create in contradiction to himself. For the tree to possess an attribute that could impart a knowledge of spiritual evil, would be evil itself, and that would place God in a self-contradictory state of desiring to create that which he does not desire to make. The tree’s only purpose was to provide the means for man to choose to either obey God’s will or choose his own.
Take careful notice that God also never said, “If you eat from this tree, I shall surely kill you.” Rather, God said, “If you eat from this tree, you shall surely die.” What God was imparting to Adam was a profound spiritual truth regarding disobeying a supreme being: that if you disobey the one who created the world you live in, the light you see by, and the life you are living, you are essentially separating yourself from him and entering into the same spiritual environment that pre-existed creation: a lightless, empty void in which nothing lived and in such an environment, man would surely die.
Night and Day
It turns out that by building the world on top of the deep, the Garden of Eden got paid a visit by the ruling authority over the abyss described in verse 2: the serpent. The term serpent is actually the Hebrew word nachash that means shining or brassy one. In Revelations 12:9 we learn that this shining one is, in fact, a dragon: Satan. We know it is the devil described in that passage because the verse speaks about how he deceived the whole earth. If a creature other than the dragon tempted Eve, then the dragon could not have deceived the whole Earth. It also suddenly makes significant the curse God placed upon him in Genesis 3:14, for the dragon is cursed to crawl on his belly and eat dust for all the days of his life.
But more importantly is the curse regarding Satan eating dust. We know that Adam was formed from the dust, thus it stands to reason that Satan would have dominion over Adam through his death, as from dust we came and to dust we return. It certainly did not help matters for God to tell Satan in Genesis 3:15 that the woman’s seed would bruise his head. What has every fairy tale taught us about telling the villain prophecies regarding their doom? They will hunt down every possible threat and kill it. Which is why in the very next chapter we read about Cain killing Abel after Abel found favor with God. When Lucifer saw that Abel had favor, it stood to reason that Abel could be the seed meant to destroy him, or an ancestor of the seed meant to destroy him.
As we shall see in the next chapter, Satan did not give up in his attempts to thwart God’s word. In fact, the campaign he waged against the human race to orchestrate an end to man’s seed is what ultimately led to the great flood.
So all of the events leading up to the great flood are the result of God planting our world on the front door of an abyss covered in darkness, Satan abusing his authority by tempting man into disobedience, God catching him in the act and cursing him, then instigating Satan against mankind by informing him that one of Eve’s descendants will eventually defeat him.
This ultimately leads us to our final point. We see the darkness that God called the Night. We see the Light God called the Day. And after God cursed the shining one, Eve and Adam, God divided the light from the darkness through an act of atonement he performed by sacrificing an animal and covering Adam and Eve in that animal’s death.
While it may seem unfair to some that God needed to kill an animal to cover Adam’s death for something Adam did, we need to understand that Adam was of greater value to God than one of the animals He had made. We may contend with God regarding why that animal’s sacrifice was even necessary, but in doing so we show our own ignorance of something evil understands only too well.
When God said, “Let there be light,” there was light. An omnipotent being always gets what he wills. When God willed that, “should Adam eat from this tree, he shall surely die,” Satan thought he had God cornered. Tempting man to eat? Piece of cake(fruit)! Then, just as light had to exist when God spoke it, God’s favored creation would have to die if man fulfilled what God had spoken. This is why God had to sacrifice an animal in the meantime. Not because it could redeem Adam, but because its substitute for Adam reminded God of a time that would come when Christ’s perfect substitutional sacrifice would fully atone for Adam’s sin.
You will notice in Genesis 3:21, that while God offered a process of atonement for man, he gave no such offer to the dragon. In doing this, light was separated from darkness through the curse of all, and the grace of atonement for man. Thus we get a glimpse of the seriousness of the conflict between light and darkness on Day 1. What at first seems like an innocuous passage regarding the pre-existence of darkness, the creation of light and the dividing of light from darkness is actually an epic battle being waged over the putting down of the dragon’s dominion and his stronghold the abyss, but more importantly, it is the execution of the first step in God’s redemptive plan for mankind.
Adam lived for 930 years which fits well within the span of the first Millennial Day of 4000 BC to 3000 BC.