Day – 4

Day 4 – Lights

Gen 1:14-19And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to divide between the day and the night. And let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years. 15And let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so. 16And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the smaller light to rule the night, and the stars also. 17And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth, 18and to rule over the day and over the night; and to divide between the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day

. Genesis 1:4 gives us a hint: „ … and he [God] separated the light from the darkness.‟ Compare this with verse 14: „Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years … .‟ It appears, then, that for the first three days, God was either directly or indirectly involved in separating the light from the darkness, which He had named ‗day‘ and ‗night‘ respectively (v. 5). After Day 4, however, this task was assigned to the newly created Sun and Moon.

On the fourth day of Creation Week, God made the sun, the moon, the planets, and all the stars—billions of them! He just commanded them to come into being, and they did. How awesome is the power of God! God made them all for our benefit. The Bible says their purpose was to give light on the earth, with the sun to light up the day, and the moon to light up the night. They were also to be signs to mark seasons, days and years.

The sun and moon—Earth’s special lights

22The sun is the huge star at the center of our solar system. It is so big that if you wanted to fill the sun with Earths, you would need one million of them. It is made up of white-hot hydrogen and helium gases. The temperature at the sun‘s surface is about 6,000ºC, while at the center it is over 15,000,000ºC. (Water boils at only 100ºC.) The sun‘s energy comes from continuous nuclear reactions at its center that turn its hydrogen into helium, as happens in a hydrogen bomb. Despite this, the sun‘s output is mostly heat and light, with little dangerous radiation (and even this small amount is mostly blocked by our atmosphere created on Day 2). This is just right for the support of life on Earth. God Got It Just Right When God made our solar system, He did it just right. Earth is about 150 million km (93 million miles) away from the sun. This is exactly the right distance to hold the temperature between 0°C and 40°C on most of the earth. This is the temperature needed to sustain most life. If we were just 5% closer to the sun, the oceans would boil and the water would all evaporate. If the earth were only 5% further away, the oceans would freeze. Earth‘s orbit around the sun is nearly a perfect circle. If the orbit were oval-shaped (like an egg), the earth would become blazing hot as it approached the sun and deathly cold as it moved away from it. If Earth‘s speed of rotation about its own axis were much slower than it is, our days would be unbearably hot, and our nights freezing cold. If the rotation were much faster, the wind would blow so strongly that you wouldn‘t be able to stand up in the open. The length of each day and night is also just right for the amount of sleep we need.
13 The pull of gravity on the earth by the moon and the sun causes the tides. (At the beach, when the sea level is high, we say ‗it‘s high tide‘ or ‗the tide is in‘. Six hours later, we say ‗it‘s low tide‘ or ‗the tide has gone out‘.) Tides cleanse the ocean‘s shores, help put oxygen (that fish breathe) into the water, and help keep the ocean currents moving, preventing the sea from becoming stagnant. The huge planet, Jupiter, with its strong gravity, is in just the right position to pull many comets and meteors away from crashing into Earth and killing us all. God certainly knew what He was doing! He made everything just right. The Bible says that His eternal power and divine nature can be seen from the things He has made (Romans 1:20). The moon is Earth‘s own special satellite. It reflects the sun‘s light onto us, even when the sun is on the other side of the earth. It is a rocky place, with no atmosphere and no water, and huge extremes of temperature. It orbits (circles around) Earth every 29½ days. Before the Calendar came, farmers counted the full moon days to know the months – for seedtime and harvest.

Prayer Heavenly Father, perfect are all of your ways and we are so safe in your arms. I’ve seen many searching for answers far and wide,but now I know all are searchingfor answers only you provide. You are a good good father and I’m loved by you! What a privilege, what an honour! I am lost for words yet I want to say I love you and THANK YOU for creating such beautiful and a safe place for us to live. Amen. Special – Why Does Starlight Appear to Travel from Very Far At present starlight travels over many billion years, as we see from earth. How can we reconcile a young sun and earth of 6000 years with starlight travelling from very far – from billions of years
14 away.On the fourth day, having created the sun and moon, God far flung and expanded the Universe in one stroke of His power. Even now the Universe is expanding and expansion is acceleration. Who gives that power for acceleration? Scientists do not know. We do – God did the expansion. If not for this expanding power, the Universe will implode because of gravity. That is, it will collapse. Who keeps the Universe from collapse – God does. In effect we see Creation‘s First Day happening – History in travel. Expanding Universe seems to have our galaxy, Milky Way, as the Center. Velocities increase as you move away from our Milky Way. A straightforward interpretation of this data is that the galaxies are distributed with a spherical shell-like symmetry with the Milky Way galaxy at or near the center! Such a result is entirely consistent with the biblical picture. Scientists call our Universe Galacto-centric. Centered around our Galaxy. In at least 11 places, the Scriptures speak of God ‗stretching out the heavens‘ (e.g. Job 9:8, Isaiah 40:22 and 42:5, Jeremiah 10:12, Zechariah 12:1) and in Genesis 1:15 the words ‗And it was so.‘ We now have the keys to understanding how starlight can reach us from such vast distances in just a few thousand years of Earth time. The days of the Creation Week were recorded from the point of view of an observer on the earth so the time reference in Genesis is Earth time. On Day 4, as God commenced stretching out the heavens, the mass of the universe (presumably including the ‗waters above‘ which were separated out on Day 2) would have been confined to a much smaller volume of space than is the case today. Assuming the Hartnett–Carmeli theory is correct, the Universe rapidly expanded with massive time dilation as a result of very rapid acceleration of the fabric of space on Day 4. The Humphreys model on the other hand, also based on General Relativity, has clocks at the outer edge
15 of the cosmos running much faster than earth-bound clocks because of gravitational time dilation. By the end of Day 4, when God completed his work of creating the sun, moon and stars, and had stretched out the heavens to their vast extent, billions of years of cosmic time could have elapsed at the outer edges of the cosmos in just one 24-hour earth day. There would have been more than enough time for the light from distant stars to have reached the earth so that when Adam gazed at the night sky on that sixth night he would have seen much the same as what we see today. 6,000 years have passed since the Creation Week. If the models outlined above are correct, the light we see today from any star that is greater than 6,000 light years away from the earth will have originated on Day 4 itself. This would include most of the visible stars, all of which are part of the Milky Way galaxy. We are effectively looking at God‘s creative activity on Day 4 as we gaze into the universe! So what do we make of supernova 1987A? At 170,000 light years away we are looking at an event that occurred on Day 4 but whose light did not reach us until 1987.