Genesis 1:4

The earth at this point is dark and covered with water, with the Spirit of God moving over it (Genesis 1:2). No person or animal exists yet to carry out a task, so the command itself makes the light. The Hebrew of the command is two short words, yehi ʼor, “let there be light”, and the verb ʼâmar (“said”) is the everyday word for saying something, used here for a command, as the result shows. Paul describes God in the same way when he says that God calls into being things that do not yet exist (Romans 4:17).

Speaking shows how far above his creation God is. A builder needs materials, tools and time, but God only has to say what shall be. The nations around Israel told stories of gods who fought one another before the world could be made. Genesis tells of one God who speaks, and nothing resists him. The Psalms praise him for exactly this: “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made” (Psalm 33:6), and “he spake, and it was done” (Psalm 33:9). The letter to the Hebrews says that we understand by faith that the worlds were framed by God’s word (Hebrews 11:3).

“And there was light” follows the command at once, without effort or a second attempt, and the darkness of the verse before does not hold out against him. The same quick answer runs through the whole chapter in the repeated words “and it was so” (Genesis 1:7, 1:9, 1:11). This matters far beyond Genesis, because the God who speaks here is the same God who makes promises to his people. Isaiah says that his word does not come back to him empty but accomplishes what he sent it to do (Isaiah 55:11).

Scripture shows that more than one person of the one God was at work in this moment. The Spirit is already moving over the waters, and the New Testament says that all things were made through the Word (John 1:3). The name used for God throughout this chapter, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form but takes a singular verb (“God said”, never “they said”), a plural of majesty that speaks of the fullness of who he is.

When God sees that the light is good, he is approving it. The light is what he meant it to be, and it pleases him. The verb râʼâh is the usual word for seeing, and it also means to consider something, which is the sense here: God looks in order to give a verdict. He already knows all that he sees, because nothing is hidden from him (Hebrews 4:13). Scripture speaks of him in human terms so that we can understand what he is doing, the way a craftsman looks over finished work and approves it.

The Hebrew word for good, ṭôwb, is a very broad one. It covers what is pleasant, beautiful, right and fit for its purpose. People enjoy that same goodness whenever they step into the sun, as Ecclesiastes says: “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun” (Ecclesiastes 11:7).

God says “good” over one part of his work after another (Genesis 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25), and then over the whole: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). So the land, the sea, the plants, the animals and people all came from God good, and none of them is bad in itself. Paul makes the same point when he says that everything God created is good (1 Timothy 4:4).

This describes the world as God made it, before the events of Genesis 3. The Bible traces death and ruin to man’s sin (Romans 5:12), and Paul says that the whole creation now groans and waits to be set free (Romans 8:20–22). When you see suffering and wickedness, you are not seeing what God called good, and you are right to grieve over them. The Bible ends with God making all things new (Revelation 21:5).

To divide, bâdal, means to separate two things and keep them distinct. God gives light and darkness each its own time, so that they follow one another as day and night. Later in the chapter he divides the waters in the same way (Genesis 1:6–7), and on the fourth day he gives the sun and moon the task of keeping up this very division (Genesis 1:18). The same Hebrew word is used when God tells the priests to put a difference between the holy and the unholy (Leviticus 10:10). God makes clear distinctions, and it begins here.

God’s naming shows that he is in charge of what he names. The verb qârâʼ means to call out to someone or to address by name, and in Scripture the one who gives a name often has the right and the responsibility to rule what is named. God goes on to name the firmament, the dry land and the seas (Genesis 1:8, 1:10), he calls every star by name (Psalm 147:4), and he later brings the animals to Adam to see what he would call them (Genesis 2:19–20).

Night is included. God names the darkness just as he names the light, and a psalm says as much: “The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun” (Psalm 74:16). Every hour of every day is under his rule. The word for night, layil, can picture hard times elsewhere in Scripture, but here it is simply the name God gives to the darkness.

This one verse uses the word for day, yôwm, in two ways. First the light alone is called Day. Then evening and morning together make “the first day”. The same word can also mean a broader span of time, which matters for the question below.

Evening comes before morning here, and in every day of this chapter. The plainest explanation is that a day is reckoned from its evening. Israel’s law follows this order when it tells the people to keep the Day of Atonement “from even unto even” (Leviticus 23:32). Jews have long counted the day from sunset, which is why the Sabbath begins on Friday evening and ends on Saturday evening, and this verse is the natural source to point to, although Scripture itself does not draw that line from it. Our own calendars turn at midnight, which is a different custom and nothing that Scripture commands.

There is a second way of reading the order, which starts from the light. Light appears, evening (ʻereb, dusk) falls on it, and the following morning (bôqer, dawn) completes the day and leads into the next. On this reading the first darkness of verse 2 came before the day began, while on the first reading it was the day’s evening. On either reading, evening and morning mark a complete day that God has brought to its end, and the darkness was under his control from the start.

The Hebrew literally says one day, while the later days use the numbers second, third and so on (Genesis 1:8, 1:13). Hebrew commonly uses the word for one when starting a count, so the KJV’s “the first day” gives the right sense in English. This is where the count begins.

There can be days before the sun because a day in this chapter is first of all a matter of light and darkness, and God has already given both. On the fourth day he gives the sun and moon the work of ruling the day and the night (Genesis 1:16), and they take up a pattern that already exists.

The New Testament ties this passage to Jesus through both the word and the light. John opens his Gospel with the same words as Genesis, “In the beginning”, and says that the Word was with God, was God, and made all things (John 1:1–3). That Word became flesh in Jesus (John 1:14). So the God who spoke light into being did so through the Son. John goes on, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5), and Jesus later calls himself the light of the world (John 8:12).

Paul uses this very moment to describe what happens when a person comes to know Christ: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Paul sums up the creation command here in his own words. His point is that saving a person is as much God’s own work as making the first light. He uses the names of verse 5 the same way when he tells believers, “Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness” (1 Thessalonians 5:5).

In Genesis itself the light is the light of the first day, the same light that makes daytime. Scripture later uses light as a picture of God’s truth and salvation, so the physical event and the spiritual picture are two distinct things that belong together.

The God who spoke into the darkness of the first day still gives light to people who are in the dark about him. If you know Christ, Paul says your knowledge of him came from the same God who gave this command, so your faith began as God’s own work. You can pray for someone who seems far from God, knowing that he can shine into a heart as surely as he lit the world. When God says something, it holds, and his promises come from the same mouth as this command.

You can enjoy the morning light with a clear conscience, because God himself looked at it and approved. The good things of daily life are his gifts and a reason to thank him. His habit of making distinctions speaks to us too. We are called to walk as children of light (Ephesians 5:8) and to tell truth from falsehood and right from wrong.

And God gave us a world in which every day has an end. The day is for going out to work, and the evening brings that work to a close (Psalm 104:23), so your strength and time have limits by his own design. That is a mercy. You can stop when evening comes and leave things in the hands of the God who owns the night as well as the day, for he gives sleep to those he loves (Psalm 127:2). If your nights are the hardest part of your day, remember that God himself named them. They are as much his as the morning.