Genesis 1:5 - “God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.”

Introduction

In Genesis 1:2, Jesus was with the Holy Spirit, hovering over the clouds. According to Job 38:9, the clouds were like a swaddling band of darkness on the deep. It was 3.9 Ga (billion years ago), and it was raining. Hard. Before another meteor could strike the earth, hence continuing the deep's perpetual cycle of darkness, God told Jesus to let there be light. The meteors stopped. The rains let up, and light started to seep through to the deep. God saw that the light was good, and separated it from the darkness. Then...

God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

What is a Day?

According to Genesis 1:5, Day 2 began at the sunrise following Day 1. Exactly how long was Day 1? Many Christians believe it was 24 hours. However, the first four verses of Genesis 1, with confirmation from other scriptures, have such strong concurrance with the scientific record of an old earth, that seems pretty certain that it was more than 24 hours. How long is a day? It turns out that the length of a day is not as important as what constitutes its end: sunset and sunrise.

The Hebrew word for day is "Yom". It's literal meaning is not actually defined by the duration of 24 hours, but by the time from sunrise to sunrise or sunset to sunset. In all actuality, this time is never precisely 24 hours, lasting just under 24 hours from approximately June 22 - December 21 every year, and just over 24 hours per day from December 22 to June 21. It turns out that the day never meant 24 hours, because days just are not 24 hours.

Knowing that a day is marked from sunrise to sunrise in Genesis 1 can certainly provide some amount of relief from the strict 24-hour interpretation... but billions of years? Really? Yes, really. If the time between two consecutive sunrises turned out to be billions of years, then why not?

To Jesus, a Creation Day is as a Billion Years

Sunrise is not an event per se. It is an experience. Take an airplane trip from California to New York, and you lose 3 hours toward your next sunrise; on your return, you gain them back. By this reckoning, the first day of your trip will last around 21 hours (give or take a few minutes); your last day will be around 27.

As we saw in Psalm 104:3, Jesus was riding the Holy Spirit like a chariot through the clouds, wrapped in light. It does not say for how long. But scripturally, if Jesus saw another sunrise, His day would never end. But as it turns out, we know when it ended. It ended after He stopped the onslaught of meteors against the earth 3.9 Ga. It ended after the rains were consequently starting to slow. It ended after the clouds cleared just enough to draw a line along the deep, separating the day from the night. It ended when His Father in Heaven told him that the light was good, and Jesus (the master craftsman) called the light day, and the darkness night. It ended when Jesus rode His chariot into the sunset and on through the night, and into His first sunrise. Scripture states it rather simply...

"And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day."