Genesis 1:5b - What is a Day?
“And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” - Genesis 1:5
This is the first sunset and sunrise that God experienced on the earth. We know it was a sunset/sunrise because the context is day and night, the establishment of the light side of the earth’s sky and the dark. We know it was God experiencing it based on the supposition that Jesus witnessed creation, because the Holy Spirit was hovering over the waters with Jesus, and because Jesus was God’s instrument of creation. However, the creating of light in the sky surely took more than one solar day, so how could this be Jesus’ first sunset/sunrise?
The answer is that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were hovering over the deep, which implies they stayed in one place. Usually, remaining stationary would result in following a certain point of the earth, even as it rotates, experiencing day and night as that location does. However, Jesus wasn’t just creating over one part of the earth… He was creating over the entire thing, and therefore it seems more likely that the entire earth was under His view, therefore rotating past Him as He watched. From such a vantage point, Jesus would not experience sunset or sunrise… at least not until He chose to, allowing a “day” to last billions of years if that be His will.
This interpretation of a day is similar to the day-age theory, where every day represents an epoch or age of the earth. The difference is that in  the day-age theory, at least in the versions I have seen or read of, days are not sharply delineated and some even allow them to overlap.
Progressive Creation for example must allow for some overlap for bugs, which are necessary for certain plant life to flourish on Day 4, even while the animals that keep those bugs in check are not mentioned until Day 5. Another version of the Day-Age theory relegates all of God’s creative pronouncements to more of a planning session, a specification for the results of creation if you will. The sequence of development is then free to happen as it will, with some broad delineation between the eras that doesn’t fit the exact sequence of statements, yet accomplishes all that God pronounced.
The result of the Geocreatinist perspective is that every day does in fact map to a geologic age on the earth, and so Geocreationism could be considered a day-age theory. However, the day’s are not delineated in scripture by the end of an age per se, but rather by the specific and willful action of Jesus moving into the literal darkness of night at specific moment in time, and then later back into day again… a literal sunset and sunrise, if you will. A literal evening and literal morning was recorded because one literally happened… but from the position of one hovering over the earth, as opposed to one standing on its surface.
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:48 pm
[…] In my post, Genesis 1:5b - What is a Day?, I explain how a day in Genesis 1 is defined by when Jesus intentionally experienced evenings and mornings. However, I have received numerous responses of the following form: that “yom”, the word for day, always means 24-hour days, because its use in other scriptures are always meant to be treated as 24-hour days. Therefore, the argument goes, creation days, which use the same word “yom”, must by necessity be 24-hour days. In conclusion, I am twisting scripture to mean something it does not. Naturally, I disagree. […]