Evening and Morning

Joshua at Gibeon

Sundial of Ahaz

A Thousand Years

Changing Times

Evening to Evening

Cannot Lie

Fourth Day of Creation

Age-Old Hills

Sparrow's Fall

Joshua at Gibeon

“Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel:
“Sun, stand still over Gibeon;
And Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.”
So the sun stood still,
And the moon stopped,
Till the people had revenge
Upon their enemies.
Is this not written in the Book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. And there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the LORD heeded the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel.”
(Joshua 10:12-14).

Joshua's day at Gibeon exceeded 24 hours in length. It took "about a whole day" for the sun to travel from its meridian to sunset. Like the English word 'day,' this word can mean either the period of day-light, or the entire evening/morning cycle. Since there is no suggestion God also granted superhuman strength to these soldiers, 'day-light' seems likelier here. So in this case, either an interval normally lasting six hours lasted twelve instead, or else an additional twelve hours, the average length of day-light, was tacked on while the sun remained at its noon-day height ("in the midst of heaven"), for a total length of evening/morning of thirty-six hours. If the theory were true that all 'days' recorded in scripture must be twenty-four hours in length, this thirty-six hour interval could not be described as a 'day.' Yet it is so described: "And there has been no day like that, before it or after it..."

Sundial of Ahaz

“Then Isaiah said, “This is the sign to you from the LORD, that the LORD will do the thing which He has spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees or go backward ten degrees?” And Hezekiah answered, “It is an easy thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; no, but let the shadow go backward ten degrees.” So Isaiah the prophet cried out to the LORD, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down on the sundial of Ahaz.”
(2 Kings 20:9-11).
“'And this is the sign to you from the LORD, that the LORD will do this thing which He has spoken: Behold, I will bring the shadow on the sundial, which has gone down with the sun on the sundial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward.' So the sun returned ten degrees on the dial by which it had gone down.”
(Isaiah 38:7-8)

If the theory were correct that a 'day' must be twenty-four hours, these two events would have thrown the whole system out of whack, and instead of beginning at evening, each day would begin in the middle of the night. Yet no such adjustment was made. Evidently the whole system is calibrated to the returning cycle of dark/light; it does not run by the clock. Notice also that these two remarkable days are not of like length with the day before, nor the day after.

A Thousand Years

“Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or ever You had formed the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God....
For a thousand years in Your sight
Are like yesterday when it is past,
And like a watch in the night.”
(Psalm 90:1-4).
“But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
(2 Peter 3:8).

These passages do not supply a 'translation table,' but warn against measuring God by our puny standard. God is higher than we can conceive: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9):

"Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket,
And are counted as the small dust on the scales;
Look, He lifts up the isles as a very little thing.
And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn,
Nor its beasts sufficient for a burnt offering.
All nations before Him are as nothing,
And they are counted by Him less than nothing and worthless.
To whom then will you liken God?
Or what likeness will you compare to Him?" (Isaiah 40:15-18).

Realizing God's immensity and transcendence, it seems dubious that He sets His alarm clock like a farmer so He does not forget to do His chores. Why would He be bound by our time scale? Rather, He has ordained our little days to mimic His activity in creation.

Changing Times

God not only wrote the Bible, but created the astronomy that defines the Bible's 'day.' Had God intended the day to be a constant interval, He could have so constrained the laws of nature. But the observational day is not a constant interval; it changes throughout the year, and down through the ages of time:

"The basis of astronomical time systems is the Greenwich mean solar time, denoted by UT (Universal Time), sometimes also by GMT. The universal time obtained directly from observations is called UT0. If we correct this for changes of the meridian due to motions of the Earth's rotation axis (precession, nutation, motion of the pole), we get UT1. Even this is not accurate enough for modern time measurements. UT1 suffers from tiny irregularities caused by variations in the Earth's rotation rate. These variations have at least two periods, one year and half a year. Removing these effects we get UT2, which has relative errors of the order 10^-7. Even UT2 is not exact because of long-term changes in the Earth's rotation, such as slowing down due to tidal friction...The Earth's rotation rate has been slowing down so that since 1972, a leap second has been added nearly every year." (Fundamental Astronomy, H. Karttunen, P. Kroger et al, p. 39).

A second per year is a minute every sixty years, an hour in 3,600 years. No one has ever 'corrected' the compution of the sabbath for this phenomenon, because it's not the clock but darkness that starts the sabbath. The day that God created is not a fixed interval, but the continuing oscillation of dark and light.

Evening to Evening

The Jewish way of reckoning days: from evening to evening -- has the odd consequence that days are not exactly 24 hours long. From the time of the spring equinox to the summer solstice, the time of sun-down grows later as the night shrinks. Days measured from evening to evening during this period exceed 24 hours. From the autumnal equinox to the winter solstice, the night grows longer until it reaches its greatest extent, and the interval measured from evening to evening is smaller. Had it been important to God for days to be exactly 24 hours long, with nothing left over, He could have set the start-time for the day at an invariant point like midnight, as the Romans did, or noon-time. He did not, but at a variable point, evening.

Cannot Lie

“...in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began...”
(Titus 1:2).
“...that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us.”
(Hebrews 6:18)

The same God who inspired the Bible also wrote the book of nature. He made and ordered all things created, He gave law and meaning to creation, the natural realm is His handiwork. Some readers claim nature is artificially 'distressed,' that God is like an unscrupulous antiques dealer who makes something look old when it is not. But according to the word, God "cannot lie."

"I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in."
(George Washington Carver, Quotations on About.com)

We should read Genesis with the Bible in one hand and the book of nature in the other. At long last for our generation the second book is opening itself to clear the obscurities in the first; it is God's own commentary on Genesis. If, as some claim, God has testified dishonestly in the one, how can we trust His testimony in the other? Bible-believers who would see the evident blasphemy in the premise, 'You can't trust what God says in the Bible to be true, perhaps He is testing us,' nevertheless talk as if nature, His other masterwork, were an atheist fabrication. God made it; it is not falsified!

The two books not only do not conflict, but harmonize wonderfully. How long before the worldly thought of the 'Big Bang' did God's people know it all started with "Let there be light"!

Fourth Day

“Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”
(Genesis 1:16-19).

God created the sun on the fourth day of creation. The Bible does not say the sun, the "greater light," was created previously but only appeared on that day, but that God "made" them on that day.

Twenty-four hours is the period of the earth's rotation, turning toward and away from the sun's light. Before that luminary was lit, how could a 'day' have had reference to the sun's daily rising and setting? 'Darkness' and 'light,' prior to the fourth day, cannot have had any reference to the sun's daily routine and thus there is no reason to suppose this divinely ordained tag team counted out twenty-four hours.

Age-Old Hills

"The blessings of your father
Have excelled the blessings of my ancestors,
Up to the utmost bound of the everlasting hills." (Genesis 49:26).

Only God is from age to age the same:

"Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or ever You had formed the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God." (Psalm 90:2).

Some readers believe the Bible intends to communicate that the earth is young. They combine the six days of creation, which they tally at 24 hours apiece, with 40 years per generation (so that the woman Jesus identified as "daughter of Abraham" (Luke 13:16) is presumed to be forty years younger than her ancestor), to arrive at an age for the earth in the thousands of years. The Bible, however, does not say that the earth is young. Rather the Bible uses a word that means 'ancient' or 'age-old' to describe the hills:

"...With the best things of the ancient mountains,
With the precious things of the everlasting hills..." (Deuteronomy 33:15).

If the earth's age were not a substantial multiple of the average human life-span, calling the hills 'age-old' might seem excessive. Of course age is relative; what seems a long time to a may-fly might seem brief to an elephant. Still, if some readers insist the Bible means to say that the earth is young, the fact remains that the Bible does not say the earth is young, but age-old:

"One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever...
Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us." (Ecclesiastes 1:4-11).

"He stood and measured the earth;
He looked and startled the nations.
And the everlasting mountains were scattered,
The perpetual hills bowed.
His ways are everlasting." (Habakkuk 3:6).

Sparrow's Fall

“Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
(Matthew 10:29-31).

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as chance; there is no falling sparrow outside God's domain. The hallmark of God's creation is the superabundance of order there is in the world. Those who look for order, find it. But those who look for order amongst living things, searching out a 'periodic table' of the animals, are laughed at by those intent on assigning causality to what is not.

Some in the modern world have revived the old Epicurean paradigm of a world brought about by chance and selection. This is not a testable scientific hypothesis, but a global explanation of everything, which some find satisfying. Chance cannot be a cause, because it is not anything. There must be an equal degree of reality in the cause as in the effect; an unreal cause cannot bring about a real result. Explaining everything by resorting to nothing is unsound.

Say What?

These pictures show the cataclysmic event which brought the evening or night-fall of the sixth day, the onset of the 'nuclear winter' which closed the epoch of the birds a.k.a. dinosaurs.