The big question on everyone’s mind is “How long is the day in Genesis?” Young Earth Creationists make a compelling case that is 24-hours. That would seem to be the logical and literal meaning of the text. It certainly has tradition behind it and is how it has been understood for millennia.
But Hugh Ross and the folks at Reasons to Believe also make a compelling case that a day could mean an indefinite period of time. I believe both definitions are valid.
Every first-year seminary student knows that the most basic rule of hermeneutics (the study of texts) is to let the text interpret the text. Everyone has bias, and there is a natural tendency to read things into the text that are not there. In the Genesis passage, the church has let tradition and other men tell us what the passage says. So rather than look to tradition and other men to discover the definition of the word “day,” let’s look at the actual text.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he 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 1:1-5)
There are four words in this passage that have a time element in them: day, night, evening, and morning. In this chapter, we will look at day and night, and in the following chapter, evening and morning.
The first thing we need to understand is that the word “day” is not an object, but a length of time. Today, yesterday, Tuesday, the day of the Lord, in the days of Noah all signify a period of time. They have a beginning and an end.
I think we can safely say that the first day began when God said, “Let there be light,” or possibly “In the beginning.” That was easy enough. Now the tricky part. When does it end?
Let’s consider the phrase.
“God called the light “day” and the darkness he called “night”.
People have always understood this to be a 24-hour day, and that makes sense. There was no reason to doubt it. But today, there is a reason. As we gaze into the heavens, they pour forth their knowledge, and the story they tell is that the universe is much older than a few thousand years. There was a reason God put this phrase into the text, and I believe it was for future generations. God is telling people in the scientific age how long the first day was.
If we take this phrase literally, day is defined as the presence of light. As long as it is light, it must be day. Darkness is something altogether different. It is not day, but night. Darkness and light, day and night, cannot coexist. Therefore, darkness effectively ends a day.
For us, darkness and night come in the evening when the Earth blocks the sun. This happens at regular twenty-four-hour intervals as the Earth rotates around the sun. Other planets in our solar system rotate at different speeds, so their length of day is different. Jupiter and Saturn spin faster than Earth, so their day is under eleven hours, but Venus spins much more slowly. A day on Venus is about 243 Earth days. But at this point in Creation, Earth is still formless, and the sun, not yet created, so there is no way of determining the length of a day without reading it into the text. We are forced to conclude that the length of the first day, as well as the second, third, and fourth, is an indeterminate length of time. They may be twenty-four hours, or twenty-four billion years. There is simply no way to tell.
This all changes on the fourth day when:
God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19)
We now have the sun to help us out of our dilemma, and conveniently, God tells us why he created the sun and the moon.
“…let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.
The purpose of the sun and moon is to serve as signs to mark the length of a day, as well as years and sacred times. We now have something to sink our teeth into.
If the length of a day had always been 24 hours, there would be no reason to include the word day here, because people knew how long a day was.
But God is changing the definition of the word “day.” On the first day, God had defined “day” as the presence of light. Now he is changing it to the presence of the sun. The sun is to mark the beginning of a new day.
The last thing God does on the fourth day is to:
“…set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.”
You may remember the word “vault” from earlier in the narrative. It was created on the second day when God separated the waters above from the waters below. Here is where God puts everything in motion by uniting the earth he formed on the second and third day with the sun, moon, and stars he created on the fourth. At the close of the fourth day, Earth is rotating on its axis, setting the length of a day at 24 hours. We are now locked into a 24-hour day. This definition will be in place until the heavens and the earth pass away, and the new heaven and earth (Revelation 21) are ushered in, when the glory of God will be the light.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh days are then 24-hour days. We can use this timeline without violating the text. We don’t have to jump through hoops to make it say what we want, and we are using the passage to interpret the text. I believe it is the most literal way to understand the text, and I would argue that it is the most accurate.
This view leaves intact the seven-day creation and does not contradict Exodus 20:11, where it says:
“For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
It incorporates the strengths of young and old Earth creation. Darwinian evolution is out the window, and the Big Bang is still intact. Both sides have to give a little, but in my limited understanding, it fits better with Creation and the scientific evidence.