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?

An article by Ken Ham:

There are many different, what I call “compromise positions,” on Genesis such as theistic evolution, progressive creation, gap theory, day age theory, and many others. They actually all have one thing in common: trying to fit the supposed millions/billions of years into Scripture. Let’s look at one of these positions that has been fairly prevalent, progressive creation.

This position (popularized by Dr. Hugh Ross) allowed Christians to use the term “creationist” but still gave them supposed academic respectability in the eyes of the world by rejecting six literal days of creation and maintaining billions of years.

In summary, progressive creation teaches:

The big-bang origin of the universe occurred about 13–15 billion years ago.

The days of creation were overlapping periods of millions and billions of years.

Over millions of years, God created new species as others kept going extinct.

The record of nature (as interpreted by man) is just as reliable as the Word of God.

Death, bloodshed, and disease existed before Adam and Eve.

Manlike creatures that looked and behaved much like us (and painted on cave walls) existed before Adam and Eve but did not have a spirit that was made in the image of God, and thus had no hope of salvation.

The Genesis flood was a local event.

The big bang origin of the universe

Progressive creationists claim that the days of creation in Genesis chapter 1 represent long periods of time and that day three of creation week lasted more than three billion years! This assertion is made in order to allow for the billions of years that evolutionists claim are represented in the rock layers of earth. This position, however, has problems, both biblically and scientifically.

The text of Genesis 1 clearly states that God supernaturally created all that is in six actual days. If we are prepared to let the words of the text speak to us in accord with the context and their normal definitions, without influence from outside ideas, then the word for “day” in Genesis 1 obviously means an ordinary day of about 24 hours. It is qualified by a number, the phrase “evening and morning,” and for day one, the words “light and darkness.”

As their name indicates, progressive creationists believe that God progressively created species on earth over billions of years, with new species replacing extinct ones, starting with simple organisms and culminating in the creation of Adam and Eve. They accept the evolutionary order for the development of life on earth, even though this contradicts the order given in the Genesis account of creation. Evolutionary belief holds that the first life forms were marine organisms, while the Bible says that God created land plants first. Reptiles are supposed to have predated birds, while Genesis says that birds came first. Evolutionists believe that land mammals came before whales, while the Bible teaches that God created whales first.

Progressive creationists have stated that nature is “just as perfect” as the Bible and call nature the “sixty-seventh book” of the Bible.

Now God tells us in Romans 8:22 that “the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs” because of sin. And not only was the universe cursed, but man himself has been affected by the fall. So how can sinful, fallible human beings in a sin-cursed universe say that their interpretation of the evidence (nature) is as perfect as God’s written revelation? Scientific assertions must use fallible assumptions and fallen reasoning—how can this be the Word of God? It can’t.

Christians should build their thinking on the Bible, not on fallible interpretations of scientific observations about the past.

Progressive creationists believe the fossil record was formed from the millions of animals that lived and died before Adam and Eve were created. They accept the idea that there was death, bloodshed, and disease (including cancer) before sin, which goes directly against the teaching of the Bible and dishonors the character of God.

But God created a perfect world at the beginning. When he was finished, God stated that his creation was “very good.” The Bible makes it clear that man and all the animals were vegetarians before the fall (Genesis 1:29-30). Plants were given to them for food (plants do not have a nephesh [life spirit] as man and animals do and thus eating them would not constitute “death” in the biblical sense).

Concerning the entrance of sin into the world, progressive creationist Dr. Ross writes, “The groaning of creation in anticipation of release from sin has lasted fifteen billion years and affected a hundred billion trillion stars.”

The Bible,however, teaches something quite different. In the context of human death, the apostle Paul states, “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin” (Romans 5:12). It is clear that there was no sin in the world before Adam sinned, and thus no death.

Since evolutionary radiometric dating methods have dated certain humanlike fossils as older than Ross’s date for modern humans (approx. 40,000 years), he and other progressive creationists insist that these are fossils of pre-Adamic creatures that had no spirit, and thus no salvation.

Progressive creationists accept and defend evolutionary dating methods, so they must redefine all evidence of humans (descendants of Noah) if they are given evolutionary dates of more than about 40,000 years (e.g., the Neanderthal cave sites) as related to spiritless “hominids,” which the Bible does not mention. However, these same methods have been used to “date” the Australian Aborigines back at least 60,000 years (some have claimed much older) and fossils of “anatomically modern humans” to over 100,000 years. By Ross’s reasoning, none of these (including the Australian Aborigines) could be descendants of Adam and Eve and so wouldn’t have souls. However, Acts 17:26 says, “And he has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings”. All people who have lived on earth are descendants of Adam.

In addition, the fossil record cannot, by its very nature, conclusively reveal if a creature had a spirit or not, since spirits are not fossilized. But there is clear evidence that creatures, which progressive creationists place before Adam, had art and clever technology and that they buried their dead in a way that many of Adam’s descendants did. They were fully human and actually descendants of Adam, and they lived only a few thousand years ago.

Progressive creationists will say they believe in a “universal” or “worldwide” flood, but in reality they do not believe that the flood covered the whole earth. They believe in a local flood. They argue that the text of Genesis 7 doesn’t really say that the flood covered the whole earth. But read it for yourself and you will find the language overwhelmingly speaks of a flood covering the entire earth and everything on it.

Now it is true that whether one believes in six literal days does not ultimately affect one’s salvation, if one is truly born again. However, we need to stand back and look at the “big picture.” In many nations, the Word of God was once widely respected and taken seriously. But once the door of compromise is unlocked and Christian leaders concede that we shouldn’t take the Bible as written in Genesis, why should the world take heed of it in any area? Because the Church has told the world that one can use man’s interpretation of the world (such as billions of years) to reinterpret the Bible, it is seen as an outdated, scientifically incorrect “holy book,” not intended to be taken seriously.

Beware of compromise positions that attempt to fit man’s evolutionary/millions of years beliefs into the Bible.