God’s Word for You

Genesis 1:5b evening and morning

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, July 28, 2026

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

For Moses and the Jews, the fall of evening marked the end of the day. Various cultures follow a different pattern. Some wait for sunrise. The Romans are responsible for our use of midnight as the passage from one day to the next.

Moses teaches three important things here: First, that evening and morning were now underway and a part of the regular working of the world. Second, that this was the conclusion of the first day of creation. Thirdly, the account of creation is told day by day, so that we see the Lord’s orderly plan proceeding as he saw fit.

This is the right time to point out that there is no long interval of time between any of God’s divine commands and when they were carried out. God speaks, and it is done on that day. There is no room in the text for millions of years to intervene, with one thing slowly leading to another. “There is room in the account,” teaches Professor Deutschlander, “neither for raw evolutionary theory nor for its pious sounding cousin, ‘theistic evolution’” (Grace Abounds, p. 127). The idea that things came into being by accident over billions of years is a supposition that flatly denies Scripture. But there is also a serious and equally unacceptable problem with theistic evolution. It imagines that God got the process going, but that the universe unfolded over the course of billions or at least millions of years through a natural process of selection. But theistic evolution will never satisfy the true evolutionist, who wants to remove God from any explanation of life and the purpose of life. But there is also a contradiction in the theory of theistic evolution that has to be called out. “If one considers God the miraculous source of all that is, it is no stretch to accept [God’s] own account of how all that is came into being.” Nothing is accomplished by accepting God as the miraculous Originator but by removing his own description of the miraculous origin of all things in the Creation account.

Someone might ask, isn’t it true that the Hebrew word “day” (yom) can mean something other that a normal day? The answer is yes. This happens, for example, in the prophets: “In that day the LORD will whistle for flies from the distant streams of Egypt and for bees from the land of Assyria” (Isaiah 7:18). And again, “In that day I will break Israel’s bow in the Valley of Jezreel” (Hosea 1:5). But what we must acknowledge is that here in the context of the creation account, days are shown to consist of “an evening and a morning.” The days of creation were normal days; this was a six-day week. If this were not the case, then God’s command for us to have a day of rest like his day of rest (Genesis 2:2-3) would mean that our Saturdays should be millions or billions of years in length. That’s a lot of cartoons to watch over a bowl of Fruit Loops.

Now, there have been plenty of errors about creation. The ancient Gnostics were opposed to the Biblical account of creation because they saw (in the flawed material world) the work of someone or something other than God. To them, creation must have been an error committed by an inferior being, or an evil one, or at least an ignorant one. The Gnostic view held that the world is worthless and entirely evil.

The Arians thought that the angels were created before the beginning, and (far worse) they thought that the Son of God was a creation, made by God before the beginning. But there are so many holes and errors in Arianism that it is hardly worthwhile trimming the branches of a rotten tree that has already fallen down.

And there were early church fathers like Hilary and Augustine who thought that the world was created instantaneously and all at the same time, in a moment, and not over the course of six days.

So through Moses, the Holy Spirit has knocked down errors of thinking that the creation happened much more quickly or much more slowly by giving us the actual and correct time frame: six ordinary days. There was a created emulsion, not a big bang, and it was formed in a week, not evolving over millions of years; it was formed by the word of God and by the hands of God. We are well-guided by Martin Luther, who, after discussing some of these things briefly, said this:

“Therefore, disregarding these needless opinions, let us turn to Moses as the better teacher. We can follow him with greater safety than the philosophers, who, without benefit of the Word, debate about unknown matters.”

If Moses, writing under divine inspiration, had wanted to talk about long periods of unbounded time such as ages or eons, he had sufficient language even in fifteenth-century BC Hebrew. He could have used ‘olam, for example, as he does in Psalm 90:2, “From everlasting to everlasting,” or in Genesis 9:12, “a covenant for generations a long time in the future.” How we take this to heart also shows how we will take to heart the words of Jesus, “This is my body, this is my blood.” There would have been ways that the Lord could have said, “This represents my body,” or “this stands for my body,” but he did not. He said, “This is my body,” and this is how he would have us understand his words. It is a hallmark of fallen, sinful man, that people take what should be nothing but the gospel and turn it into a debate. This is the work of the devil, who wants every bizarre idea to seem reasonable so that the Scripture seems unreasonable. Therefore this is where we listen to Jesus, and quote the words he spoke: “Get behind me, Satan.” And then we pray, “May my cry come before you, O Lord. Give me understanding according to your word” (Psalm 119:169).

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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