Tuesday
Tuesday
Light out of Darkness
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Genesis 1:3
The little territory of Israel was sandwiched between the mighty empires of Babylon to their north and Egypt to their south, and in both countries some form of the worship of sun, moon, and stars was popular. In Egypt the center of sun worship was On, whose Greek name was Heliopolis, “the city of the sun,” a few miles outside Cairo. In Babylon astronomers had already developed elaborate calculations of the movements of the five planets they knew and had begun to map the heavens.
It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that many Israelite leaders became contaminated with the astral cults that surrounded them. Ezekiel was horrified to see twenty-five men “with their backs toward the temple of the LORD and their faces toward the east … bowing down to the sun in the east” (Ezek. 8:16).
Jeremiah also condemned the leaders of the nation for loving and serving “the sun and the moon and all the stars of the heavens” (Jer. 8:2).
It is against this background of idolatry that Genesis 1 needs to be read and understood. The Egyptians and the Babylonians were worshiping the sun, the moon, and the stars; the author of Genesis insists that they are not gods to be worshiped but the creation of the one true God.
God promised Abraham descendants “as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore” (Gen. 22:17). The extraordinary thing is that, with our knowledge of about one hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and of billions more galaxies billions of light-years away, the equivalence of sand and stars may well be fairly accurate.
The apostle Paul took God’s majestic fiat “Let there be light” as a model of what happens in the new creation. He likens the unregenerate human heart to the dark primeval chaos and the new birth to God’s creative command, “Let there be light.” This had certainly been his own experience. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
For further reading: 2 Corinthians 4:3–6