Dr. Barclay with Something to Think About - June 21, 2020

THE LIGHT   

Part 1a

I have a Bible, edited by Ernest Sutherland Bates, in which the introduction to Genesis starts out with theses words: “Twenty-eight (really more like thirty-eight) centuries ago an unknown Hebrew priest wrote a poem about the Creation of the world. He knew nothing about environmental science, and less than nothing about astrophysics; his insight was only poetic. Yet most of science and physics for the last two hundred years has been devoted to trying to explain his poem.”

One aspect of this “poem” has been the concept of light. In the first chapter of Genesis, ³God said, “Let there be light: and there was light”. In the next verse states that: “⁴God saw the light, that it was good”. He was evidently pleased and then “⁵God divided the light from the darkness” so the two would be separate.

Now since God apparently did not create the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day, where did the light on the first day come from? And was this one of the questions raised in the poem written by the Hebrew priest so many years ago?

To find the possible answer to this question, we may have to look at something written about 1500 years after the poem mentioned above. You see John wrote in chapter 1 (similar to what was written in Genesis 1:1): “¹In the beginning was the Word and…⁴in Him was Life: and the Life was the Light of men.”

Again in John, Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). And in Ephesians chapter 5 it is said that, “¹⁴Christ shall give you Light”.

But the real answer to the question, brought up in the first chapter of the first book in the Bible, is probably answered best in the second last chapter of the last book in the Bible, written about 1500 years after Genesis. Revelation 21:23 states “the city (New Jerusalem) had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the Glory of God gives it light and the Lamb is the light.

If the answer to a question can come in the Bible 1500 years after the question is asked, that really should give us pause to think.