Genesis 1:14-19
Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Again, there is a lot of detail listed here that is relevant to understanding the fourth Millennial Day. So let’s make another list.
- Lights created in the expanse of the heavens(above the earth)
- These lights give light on the earth; they give signs and seasons
- The lights divide the day from the night, which is distinguished from the division in day 1 where light is divided from darkness.
- God makes two greater lights, one to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night
- Specific symbols: heavens, day, night, signs and seasons, stars, earth, darkness, light
- General symbols: lesser light to rule the night, greater light to rule the day
Not As It Seems
Unlike the previous days, Day 4 posed the greatest difficulty to unlock because it includes both specific symbols, and ambiguous symbols. Specific symbols we can quickly identify and extract their inherent meaning. For example, earth is once again referenced on Day 4; it is also the same Hebrew word erets used on Day 3 to identify the Israelite nation God delivered from the seas both literally and figuratively. They were literally redeemed from the seas when God parted the Red Sea to allow them to cross on dry ground, and they were figuratively separated from the Gentiles through the covenant that God established with them alone.
Ambiguous symbols like the greater and lesser lights are a snare for those who make assumptions too quickly. While the phrases “greater light to rule the day” and “lesser light to rule the night” imply the sun and the moon, Moses did not make use of the Hebrew words shemesh for sun and yareach for moon, when he quite could have. For in writing Genesis 37:9 regarding Joseph’s dream, Moses uses both these words. Given that these words were within Moses’ vocabulary when he wrote Genesis 1, we ought to be cautious about presuming what these two lights are too quickly. If God truly is the divine author of Genesis 1, then we are dealing with a great intelligence, and assuming we know what He means, when He has been intentionally ambiguous regarding what we could rightly presume to be the sun and the moon, is how mistakes are made when reading the Bible.
Lost Into the Night
From the text we can discern some facts. We know, for example, that the lights are all created in the firmament of the heavens and they give light to the earth. Most appear in the night, and we know this because stars is plural rather than singular, and stars only appear when night is full. Which leaves only the greater light during the day to shine alone.
We know that earth represents the Israelite nation. Though the lights appear during the night and day, the emphasis is clearly on the night due to the number of lights available. When searching for the identity of a needle in a haystack, it is always best to start with the haystack that has the most needles. But there is another reason we should start with the night.
The Jewish calendar is designed in such a way that day begins on the evening before and extends overnight to the evening of the following day. Which means that night always precedes the day. This is illustrated in several ways in Genesis itself, if you go back and reread the ending to each day, you will notice that God identifies the days by saying “and it was evening and morning the [Nth] day.” Furthermore, the logic behind this is founded in the fact that prior to God creating light, darkness pre-existed. Thus, if we are going to identify these lights, it helps to start at the beginning.
Night is one of the words we already know from Day 1; night is the name given to the darkness and darkness represented the contrast with light just as evil contrasted with good in the forbidden tree. Darkness is strongly symbolic of spiritual ignorance and evil; and night is when darkness is full upon the surface of the world. Now, Day 4 makes a distinction regarding what part of the world with which we ought to be concerned, realizing that the surface of the world is made up of land and water and these two symbols mean different things as far as Genesis is concerned. Since the lights being created are made to “give light to the earth” we are only concerned with the earth or land, not the waters or the seas. So this light is exclusive to the nation of Israel.
But if the stars are giving light to the land, then it also stands to reason that the darkness of night is being given to the land as well. So we are looking for something in 1000-1BC where the nation of Israel suffered under spiritual ignorance. Since darkness is spiritual ignorance, all forms of light must represent their opposite. In fact, the Bible gives us a great definition that describes exactly that in Daniel 12:3, “Those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”
This passage is remarkably similar to the description of the lights from Day 3 in the same generalized sense that God describes the lights that rule the day and night, but specifically calls out the stars. Why didn’t God and Daniel identify the sun and moon, but instead make vague reference to them through their descriptions? This description not only contrasts well with the darkness, but it does something else for us as well. For the first time, it personifies the symbols of light. Originally, in Day 1 we had very little to go on to make reference to actual persons, though we could see the traits of light and darkness exhibited in God, Adam and Eve, and the Dragon. Now we can say with some certainty that some of these symbols actually represent persons.
Therefore, looking at the timeline for Israel between 1000-1BC we immediately find what we are looking for. Israel did indeed go through a terrible time of spiritual ignorance as described by the symbols in Genesis 1, but to understand it, we actually have to rewind the tape a bit.
The Worst That Could Happen
After Moses brought the nation of Israel to the Promised Land, he imparted his authority to Joshua, who in turn passed it onto a series of Judges that ended with Samuel in 1100-1000 BC. Samuel was also a priest for Israel, but something significant happened under Samuel that would forever change the course of Israel.
The Jews asked Samuel for something that created a divide between God and the nation of Israel; the consequence of which, God himself warned, He would not deliver them from. The fulfillment of this request opened the door for spiritual darkness to cover the entire nation of Israel and even threatened God’s plan regarding the Jews. What was so serious that could have caused all of these things? We find out in 1 Samuel 8:5, when Israel says to Samuel, “Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations.”
The significance of this request lays in the fact that up until this point Israel was led by the priests and the Judges. So in asking for a King to rule over them, Israel was not only rejecting Samuel as their leader, but more importantly, they were rejecting God as their King. So why was this a big deal?
Saul was their first king and he ended up going crazy in his murderous pursuit of David, the shepherd boy anointed to be his successor. I strongly believe that Saul was an opportunity for Israel to realize their mistake and recant, but they did not. So after Saul, David became king. Though he was better than Saul, he still committed adultery and murdered the woman’s husband to cover up his sin. After David, his son, Solomon, took the throne and brought great prosperity to Israel, but under his rule the spiritual direction of Israel began to stray from God and the trouble began.
King Ahab entered the picture around 885 BC and his wife, Queen Jezebel, introduced Israel to the worship of another god named Baal. The two also allowed for the building of Asherah poles in the high places. Now unless you understand the covenant God struck with Israel, you cannot begin to appreciate what a colossal mistake this was for the nation of Israel.
In Exodus 20 we read the first of the Ten Commandments written on stone, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” With the introduction of Baal worship, the Israelites unequivocally violated this commandment. The very next commandment reads, “You shall not make for yourself an idol…You shall not worship them or serve them.” By building those Asherah poles in the high places, the Israelites broke this one as well. As much as skeptics complain about God instructing Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, which Abraham never had to follow through on, Jezebel introduced worship of a pagan god that actually did require the sacrifice of sons and daughters on a regular basis.
The reign of these kings marked a dark time for Israel. This period happened over a series of cycles, or seasons as Genesis 1 Day 4 hints at, whereby, under the misguided leadership of their king, Israel turned away from God only to be punished. Then, under the spiritually directed leadership of their king, Israel turned back to God and was blessed.
Starlight, Star Bright
It is the source of the spiritual direction to which the kings turned where we finally find our stars. It turns out that these stars were the prophets of the Old Testament of which there were four major ones: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. These also included the twelve minor prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai Zechariah and Malachi. When we examine the time periods in which these and other prophets in the Bible lived and ministered to Israel, we discover an interesting pattern: all but four lived in the 1000-1 BC window of Millennial Day 4.
| Name | Years Active |
Within 1000-1BC |
| Abraham | ~2000BC |
╳ |
| Moses | 1400-1200 BC |
╳ |
| Samuel | 1200-1000 BC |
╳ |
| Elijah | 900-800 BC |
✓ |
| Micaiah | 900-800 BC |
✓ |
| Elisha | 900-700 BC |
✓ |
| Obadiah | 900-800 BC |
✓ |
| Jonah | 800-700 BC |
✓ |
| Hosea | 800-700 BC |
✓ |
| Amos | 800-700 BC |
✓ |
| Isaiah | 800-600 BC |
✓ |
| Micah | 800-700 BC |
✓ |
| Oded | 800-700 BC |
✓ |
| Nahum | 700-600 BC |
✓ |
| Zepheniah | 700-600 BC |
✓ |
| Nahum | 700-600 BC |
✓ |
| Huldah(the prophetess) | 700-500 BC |
✓ |
| Habakkuk | 700-500 BC |
✓ |
| Baruch | 600-500 BC |
✓ |
| Daniel | 700-500 BC |
✓ |
| Ezekiel | 600-500 BC |
✓ |
| Obadiah | 600-500 BC |
✓ |
| Joel | 600-500 BC |
✓ |
| Haggai | 600-500 BC |
✓ |
| Zechariah | 600-500 BC |
✓ |
| Malachi | 500-400 BC |
✓ |
| Joel | 500-400 BC |
✓ |
| John the Baptist | 100BC-50 AD |
╳ |
Now I’ve included the likes of Abraham, Moses, Samuel and John the Baptist to illustrate an important point. We are not simply looking for prophets in general, rather the many prophets who lived on Millennial Day 4. We need many, because there are many stars in the night sky. Additionally, these prophets had to be in the symbolic representation of night for Israel, which happened precisely on Millennial Day 4. This means that even though Abraham was considered a prophet by God, he was also a friend of God and greatly blessed, so he did not live under this spiritual night. Moses, who was also a great prophet who performed many signs and wonders, including delivering Israel from Egypt, had not yet brought the people of Israel out from among the Gentiles, nor did he enter the Promised Land with the rest of Israel. So he did not meet the requirements of the symbols: being of the land under night.
Samuel lived close enough to it, but he was the priest under which the situation was seeded. It did not actually take root in the waywardness of Solomon and Ahab until long after Samuel was gone. So he could not have provided any light to the spiritual ignorance the nation suffered from since he was not there for it.
This leaves John the Baptist, who was born prior to 1BC but whose ministry took place in 28-29AD. It is in situations like John the Baptist where we may need to recognize that we are dealing with a ten-hundred year span of time, the approximate start year of 4000 BC is based on careful calculations derived from the Bible’s genealogies by Archbishop James Ussher. While the accuracy has been verified by a number of different peers, some discrepancies may exist, so some minor flexibility on a couple of decades is not a very big deal, whereas stretching this to meet a hundred years, as in Samuel’s case, would be too big a stretch.
Even if that were an issue for the skeptic, one other point needs to be made regarding the type of paradigm God used to communicate this message: a series of seven consecutive days. Which means that events on Day 1 would carry over to Day 2 and so forth. We would not expect the land God created in Day 3 to disappear on Days 4, 5, 6, or 7 without explanation; likewise with the light created on Day 1. So for John the Baptist to appear just on the edge or outside the window of Millennial Day 4 suggests less an error to the prophecy God placed in Genesis, than the carrying forward of things already established on a prior day.
Nevertheless, there is something to be said of John the Baptist and it comes from an angel of the Lord telling John’s parents, prior to his birth, in Luke 1:17 that John would, “go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah.”
Second Star to the Right and Straight on ‘Til Morning
If we look at our list of symbols, we can see that we have identified the stars, the light, the night, and the darkness, but the day, the lesser and the greater lights remain undefined. Since we started with night, we ought to start with the lesser light that ruled the night. The “spirit and power of Elijah” in Luke 1:17 makes reference to the Prophet Elijah who appeared at the beginning of this spiritual night that hung over Israel. Like Moses, he performed many miracles. Among them, he had a dramatic showdown with all the prophets of Baal, where he challenged them to call down fire from their god Baal to consume an offering, but despite all their efforts they could not. Then Elijah had a trench dug around his alter and had 12 barrels of water poured upon it so that it was completely soaked. When he called down fire it consumed not only the sacrifice, but also the stones of the altar and licked up even the water in the trench. Elijah spoke a drought upon the land that lasted for three years and ended only after he prayed for it to cease. He prophesied over a widow’s jar of oil that it would not run dry during the entire drought, and when her son died, Elijah was the prophet who raised him from the dead. When King Ahab sent two separate groups of 51 soldiers each to seize Elijah, he called down fire that consumed all of them both times. Finally, when Elijah’s time was nearing the end, he divided the river Jordan and walked across the dry land before being taken up into heaven by a whirlwind. Before he left, however, the Prophet Elisha received a double portion of the spirit under which Elijah operated. Through this double portion, Elisha also did many signs and wonders, and the spirit he was under is the same spirit that the angel said was on John the Baptist: the spirit of Elijah. Which helps us to understand why the symbol for the lesser light is ambiguous, because there is nothing in the heaven to adequately describe a spirit in terms that man can understand like a star we see, or the earth under our feet.
But if the spirit of Elijah was the lesser spirit that ruled the night, which it clearly did, then what of the greater light that God ordained should rule the day? Well, since the spirit of Elijah came with a man, we ought to expect that this greater light, which is greater than the spirit of Elijah, might also come with a man. In fact, John the Baptist himself said in Mark 1:7, “After me One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to stoop down and untie the thong of His sandals.” Thus we have confirmation that the spirit at work in John testified to his rank as the lesser light compared to the one who is coming.
John the Baptist goes on to further identify who this coming person is in John 1:29-30, “The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is He on behalf of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’ I did not recognize Him, but so that He might be manifested to Israel, I came baptizing in water.” So John reconfirms that he is the lesser light, but goes on to identify Jesus as the one through whom the greater light will enter the world. Since the spirit of Elijah accompanied Elijah into the world, it only stands to reason that a greater spirit accompanied Jesus into the world. And in fact, God sent the Holy Spirit and imparted him to Jesus’ disciples at Pentecost after his death and resurrection. But the Holy Spirit was not given until around 33 AD. How do we explain this since that is taking us into the 5th Millennial Day?
Recall that according to the Jewish calendar, night precedes day. Night is clearly demonstrated in Millennial Day 4 with all that happened with Israel’s errant kings. But where is day? Notice that God ordained these things on Day 4. Before Jesus, there was John the Baptist, all the prophets and Elijah. But Moses also performed wonders like Elijah, so while it has never been said, we can wonder if perhaps this same spirit of Elijah was at work through Moses. We do not know though, for the Bible does not say. Yet it was Moses and Elijah who met with Jesus on the mountain during his transfiguration in Matthew 17.
We know that night and day are divided equally into a 24 hour period where each has dominion over the world for 12 hours each. But at the boundaries, night and day have a sort of shared custody in the hours of dusk and dawn where night transitions to day. If we were to take the course of seven days and divide it in half, we end up on Day 4. It is at the end of Day 4 where the spirit of Elijah in John the Baptist meets the Holy Spirit in Jesus–the transition of night to day, and again in Matthew 17 during Jesus’ transfiguration when Moses and Elijah appear to Jesus and Jesus is glorified by a voice from heaven that states: “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!” The lesser light and the greater light together and the passing of dominion over the earth, or Israel, from one authority to the next.
While there is much more than can possibly be said of Jesus, perhaps the most important for this study is what Jesus says about himself as it pertains to Genesis 1. In John 8:12 we read, “Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.’” Boom!
Recall that we learned from the scriptural definition for stars that the symbols represented persons. Originally we believed that the light and darkness simply represented forces of good and evil, or spiritual truth and spiritual ignorance. But here we finally discover the truth; the Light that appeared on Day 1 was none other than Jesus Christ himself! He emphasizes that point by contrasting his description of himself with the darkness also described on Day 1. John the Baptist confirms this truth as well, when he said in John 1:29-30, “for He existed before me.” This is a rather absurd claim to make, considering that John was conceived by his parents before Jesus was conceived in Mary, which would make John the approximately 6 month older cousin, yet here John is claiming that Jesus existed before him!
So Day 4 is translated completely: Then God said, “Let there be spirits(lights) in the firmament of the heavens to divide the time of spiritual revelation(day) from the time of spiritual ignorance(night); and let them be for prophesying, miracles(signs) and appointed times(seasons), and for days and years; and let them be for spirits(lights) in the firmament of the heavens to give spiritual direction(light) on the nation of Israel(earth)”; and it was so. Then God made two great spirits(lights): the Holy Spirit(greater light) to rule the time of spiritual revelation(day), and the spirit of Elijah(lesser light) to rule the time of spiritual ignorance(night). He made the prophets(stars) also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give spiritual direction(light) on the nation of Israel(earth), and to rule over the time of spiritual revelation(day) and over the time of spiritual ignorance(night), and to divide Jesus(the light) from the dragon(darkness). And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth (Millennial) day.”
Now, because the books of the prophets spans many hundreds of years, were written by a variety of different individuals, sometimes in very different parts of the world, we can no longer come to the conclusion that it was a conspiracy of a single author to make history fit a prescribed template. The conspiracy would now have to include many men, over a span of many hundreds of years, from different regions of the Middle East many of whom never came into contact with one another. Furthermore, it would have to include Jewish Christians involved with forming the New Testament church and writing its history, which is even less likely considering the view many Jews had of Gentiles.
But what Day 5 and 6 will reveal destroys any credibility to a conspiracy, because what is described on Day 5 could not have been known by Moses nor planned by the followers of Christ without divine assistance.