If God made the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day of creation, what exactly governed the first three? A congregant named Andrew put that question to John MacArthur, and the answer turns on a distinction we tend to collapse: light is not the same thing as the sun. What follows is his reply:
ANDREW (questioner): Hello, Pastor John. My name is Andrew, and I have a question on the first seven days of creation in Genesis.
DR. MACARTHUR: On what?
ANDREW: The first seven days of creation in Genesis.
DR. MACARTHUR: Sure. Six days. Sure. Seventh day, God rested.
ANDREW: So Genesis 1:14 through 19 describes how God made the sun, moon, and stars on day four of creation, and then he put them in the sky for signs, seasons, days, and years. A day, scientifically, is defined as the rotation of the earth around its axis one time. So before day four, there was no sun, so you wouldn’t have what we think of today as a day. So can you shine some light on what this means, from other passages in Scripture, on what a day is?
DR. MACARTHUR: Well, a day is one cycle that you just described, of the earth’s rotation, right? That’s a day, morning and evening. Your question, of course, is that you don’t have the creation of the sun at the very beginning. So you have to have a day without a sun, right? Correct? That is the question.
And my answer is, okay, you have a day without a sun. I don’t see that as a problem. You don’t have, until verse 14, the actual lights, the sun and the moon, and yet you have three days of creation leading up to that. So you have light then, the existence of light without a sun and without a moon. That simply means that light existed. It existed in some form that was consistent with a single rotation of the earth.
In the beginning of Genesis, “Let there be light,” there was light. Now, light is not the body from which it is reflected. Light is not the sun, and light is not the moon. Light is light. Light was created, and darkness was created also, on the first day. So there was light and darkness.
Without the celestial bodies, there was still light, there was still darkness and light, there was still morning, there was still evening. That’s as far as I can take it. But again, I think it’s so explicit that God is intending to communicate to us this actual one rotation of the earth kind of cycle that we know as morning and evening.
The phenomenon itself doesn’t have to be explained scientifically. For what reason? Because creation cannot be explained scientifically. But to help you with that: when scientists try to explain creation, they are trying to do the impossible, because there is no scientific explanation for creation. Let me tell you why.
Once, there was only God, and there was nothing. And then, instantaneously, there was light. And then there was water. Then there was heaven. Then there was dry land. Then there were plants. Then there were celestial bodies. Then there were living creatures. Then there were humans. And that all happened in six days. There is no scientific explanation for that. Anybody who thinks you could explain that scientifically is out of their mind. Nothing existed, and then the entire universe came into existence in six days. That is a divine miracle.
There is no scientific explanation for the resurrection of Lazarus. There’s no scientific explanation for the resurrection of anybody, including our Lord. There’s no scientific explanation for Jesus creating food to feed probably 20,000 people. There’s no scientific explanation for that.
Science is out of the discussion when you have a miracle. And the most massive miracle was the creation of the entire universe in six days. That has no scientific explanation. So to pose a question into the first chapter of Genesis about the science of it is alien to the entire event itself. You start with nothing, and ex nihilo, out of nothing, comes everything, by the massive power of God. That’s all we need to know. And if God says it was evening and morning, it was equal to the rotation of that one cycle that’s so familiar to us. If it was equal to that, then even before those bodies existed, then that’s exactly what God intended us to understand. Okay?