Podcast Episode 3: Light from Nothing

[ This is a transcript of today’s Christian Pilgrimage podcast. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.]

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
-Genesis 1:3-5

I don’t know how many times I’ve read this. You know, it’s Genesis 1, and even the most undisciplined Bible readers get at least that far. But recently, I noticed something I had never noticed before. I just read from verse 3, where God creates light. But as I read on, I noticed that it wasn’t until verse 14 that God creates the sun. He created light on day one, and the sun on day four.

A lot of people much smarter than me have noticed this a long time ago, and there has been a debate about it for some time. Where did the light come from? Those who take the Bible as myth use this to attack it, and others will come up with explanations to defend it.

But I think a lot of people miss the point here.

Even in the Church, there are a lot of beliefs about Creation. Some believe in a literal six-day Creation. Others believe in a God-guided evolution, and the “days” in Genesis aren’t literal. God willing, I would like to discuss these theories in an upcoming episode.

These theories are all fine, but there is one thing God will not let you do. He will not let you explain God out of Creation. Right from the beginning of the Bible, He is going to make you choose – do you believe, or do you not?

Perhaps you can fit a theory of evolution into the Bible. Maybe you can explain all the miracles away. Maybe you can even try to rationalize the Resurrection. But in this first chapter of Genesis, God is going to ask you to either accept Him or reject Him, and there is no way around it. You either believe in a God that can make a result before a cause, or you don’t. You either believe in a God that can make light before the source of light, or you don’t.

It is an important question to ask, because this God that created an effect of the sun before the sun itself also created you, and He created you to live forever. This question is critical, because this Bible that makes this extraordinary claim at its beginning also says a lot about you. It says that only absolute perfection will earn us heaven. Have you sinned? Have you ever been greedy? Have you ever lied? Have you ever been unduly angry at someone? Have you ever lusted? Then you’ve fallen short of the glory of God. “The wages of sin is death,” and we have all earned death.

But the same God through which the universe was created came to earth in the form of a man, Jesus. He died on the Cross for us. In that death, He is able to take all of our sins upon Himself, and He is able to give us His righteousness. If we repent and follow Him, we may have life.

What do you think? Do you believe there is a God up there with the power to make light without a source? A God that is holy and blameless? The Bible tells us incredible things, not the least of which is that there is a God there who loves us, despite all the evil we have committed. There is a God who loves us so much that He gave up His own Son so that we can be reconciled to Him.