Seven Days: A Study of Genesis 1

There is only one book in the Bible that begins at the very beginning. Every other book picks up the story somewhere in the middle. Genesis starts before everything. Before the nations, before Abraham, before Adam. Before time itself, as far as human minds can reckon it. And the opening sentence wastes no words.

In the Hebrew, the first named character of the Bible is God. Not man, not a serpent, not angels. God. And the name used here is Elohim, a plural form with singular meaning. It is a general term for deity and the proper name of the true God. But its plural form is not an accident. Here, at the very first verse of Scripture, is the first hint of the Trinity. The God of the Bible is one God, yet He exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is confirmed two verses in, where the Spirit of God is found hovering over the surface of the waters.

Moses, writing under divine inspiration, does not attempt to prove God's existence. He assumes it. The answer to every question about origins is right here: In the beginning, God.

Why This Book

Genesis is the foundation. Remove it and the rest of Scripture doesn't stand. The New Testament contains more than 200 direct quotations or clear allusions to Genesis, more than from any other Old Testament book. Every major Christian doctrine either begins here or rests on something that does. It has been called the seedbed of all Christian doctrine.

That is also why it has suffered the greatest attack. You don't go after what doesn't matter. The enemy goes after foundations. Pull Genesis out from under the Bible and the whole structure staggers. So it matters that Christians know what this book actually says, and that they know how to defend it.

The book was written by Moses. That has been the settled conviction of the church from the beginning, and the testimony of the New Testament is clear. Jesus Himself refers to Moses and the writings, and the circumcision of Abraham appears in both Genesis 17 and is cited as Mosaic in the book of Acts. The challenge to Mosaic authorship came from a French physician around the time of the French Revolution. It did not come from the Bible.

The simple outline of Genesis is this: chapters 1 through 11 give the general history of man. Chapters 12 through 50 give the special history of God's people. The first three chapters are where it all begins. They tell us where we came from, what we are, and what went wrong. Everything that follows makes sense in light of them.

Day One: Light

The first word God speaks in the Bible is a command: Let there be light. He does not reach for materials. He does not assemble parts. He speaks, and something that had never existed before exists. Psalm 33:9 says He spoke and it was done. That is the God of Genesis 1, and He has not changed.

Some have tried to insert a gap between verse one and verse two, arguing that the earth "became" formless rather than "was" formless, suggesting a prior creation that was ruined before the six days began. But that reading does not hold up. The Hebrew word in question is translated "was" in 98% of its usage. Nothing in the context suggests otherwise. And the gap theory runs straight into Romans 5:12, which teaches plainly that there was no death on the earth before Adam's sin. The fossil record belongs to the flood, not to a pre-Adamite catastrophe.

Some read darkness in verse two and imagine something sinister. But Isaiah 45:7 says God created both light and darkness. Darkness in Genesis 1 is simply the absence of light before God spoke. The Spirit hovering over the waters was no idle presence. It was God energizing the universe He was in the process of making.

Then He spoke, and there was light. Before the sun existed. Some find that hard to believe. But the God who can make light from nothing is not limited to working through a star. The same power that made light on day one is the power that someday will make the light of the new creation, where there is no sun, because the Lamb is its lamp.

Verse four says God saw that the light was good. Some commentators read that like a craftsman inspecting his work and finally approving it. That is a very wrong reading. God created the light and it was perfect. He knew it would be good before He made it. There were no failures in this workshop, no adjustments, no experiments. Even the great Thomas Edison said he had not failed, he had just found ten thousand ways that would not work. God had no such list. He spoke and it was so.

On the word "day" in verse five: God defines it. He calls the light "day" and the darkness "night," and then the verse closes with the first instance of the evening-morning formula. This is the first use of the Hebrew word yom. Here it refers to the period of light, and then by the end of the verse it refers to a complete 24-hour cycle. The only kind of day that has an evening and a morning is a literal day. The Jews reckoned their days from evening to morning because darkness came before light, just as it does in Genesis 1. And Exodus 20:10-11 settles it further. God commanded Israel to work six days and rest on the seventh because that is what He did. Six billion years of work and then a billion years of rest is not what that passage is talking about.

Days Two and Three: Expanse, Land, and Vegetation

Before the expanse existed, the waters on the surface of the earth and the waters in the clouds were not separate. There was no clear air space. Whatever that looked like, it was not yet the world we know. On day two, God divided them. He separated the waters below from the waters above, and the space between became the atmospheric heaven, the sky where the birds fly.

Scripture speaks of heaven in more than one way. There is the atmospheric heaven where the birds fly (Jeremiah 4:25). There is the stellar heaven where the stars are (Isaiah 13:10). And there is the heaven of God's throne (Hebrews 9:24). What God made on day two was the first of those. The word translated "expanse" or "firmament" means something like spread-out-thinness. It is not a solid dome. The flat-earth reading of this passage is not supported by the text.

Day three brought dry land and vegetation. The wording of verse nine is significant: the waters were gathered into one place. That means the land was also in one place. One continent. The coastal lines of South America and Africa fit together almost perfectly on any world map. Genesis, taken literally, suggests they were once joined. What broke them apart is also in Genesis: the flood.

Psalm 104:7-9 speaks of God's creative work on day three and pictures the waters fleeing at His rebuke, the mountains rising and the valleys sinking to the place God appointed. The creation of dry land is what Scripture elsewhere calls the foundation of the earth (Psalm 102:25; Job 38:4; Isaiah 48:13).

God then commanded the earth to sprout vegetation. Three things are mentioned: vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees. These were not made as seeds. They were made as full-grown plants, each with the ability to reproduce after its kind. An orange tree will never become a fig tree. A variation within a kind is not the same as one kind becoming another. That boundary was set by God on day three, and it has held ever since.

Day Four: Sun, Moon, and Stars

God had created light on day one. On day four He created the sources of light. The earth is older than the sun and the moon. That is what Genesis teaches, and it contradicts evolutionary timelines directly.

These lights serve four purposes in the text: signs, seasons, days, and years. The signs are not zodiac signs. Astrology is a perversion of God's creation, and Deuteronomy 4:19 is clear about that. The lights in the sky declare the glory of the Creator. They have been used as signs for future events (Matthew 2:2; Luke 21:25), they mark the weather (Matthew 16:2-3), and they may signal divine judgment (Joel 2:30; Matthew 24:29). Days, seasons, and years are all measured by what God put in the sky on day four. None of this happened by chance.

Then the text adds three small words: "and also the stars." The sun and moon were the two great lights for this planet. The stars almost seem like an afterthought in the verse, but consider what that understatement contains. Man will never know the vastness of what is described in those three words.

The distant starlight problem deserves a word here, because it is the argument most often used against a young creation. Stars are extremely far away. Their light should take billions of years to reach earth. We can see them. So the universe must be billions of years old. The logic sounds tight. But two things are worth remembering. First, creation was a one-time, supernatural event. It cannot be repeated or tested by natural science. Second, the same God who made the stars is the God who stopped the sun in its tracks for Joshua (Joshua 10:12-14) and moved it backward for Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:9-11). He is not bound by what we assume to be the fixed laws of physics. The most satisfying explanation for visible starlight in a young creation is that God supernaturally sped the light on its way. He is able to do that.

"And it was so." God speaks and it is done. That refrain runs through the whole chapter. It is not literary filler. It is the central claim of the text. This God commands and the universe obeys.

Day Five: Sea Creatures and Birds

On day five, for the first time in the history of the world, there was animal life. Not a slow emergence from scum. Not a gradual appearance over millions of years. At God's word, the waters swarmed. Birds appeared in the air. The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, is answered here. God made the chicken.

Day five also gives us the first occurrence of the Hebrew word nephesh, usually translated "life" or "soul." Plants do not have nephesh. That is reserved for animals and for man. The distinction matters. A dead tree and a dead deer are both dead, but one of them had something the other did not.

The LSB renders verse 21 as "great sea monsters," which is the more accurate translation. The King James says "whales" because that was the largest marine animal the translators knew. But the Hebrew word tannin includes far more than whales. It includes Leviathan, described at length in Job 41, a creature no weapon can touch, whose breath blows coals and from whose mouth comes fire. And at the end of Job 41:34, God says Leviathan is king over all the sons of pride. He is king over the creatures, not a legend. He was made on day five. And the sea monsters made on day five were made after their kind, as were the birds, and every living thing in the sea.

Day Six: Land Animals and Man

Day six began with land animals. Three categories: cattle, which includes all animals that can be domesticated; creeping things, which refers to everything that lives and crawls close to the ground; and beasts of the earth, the wild animals. That covers all land animals, including the kinds we now know only from fossils.

Job 40:15-24 describes Behemoth, a creature Job apparently knew, whose tail moves like a cedar tree, whose bones are like bars of iron. Neither an elephant nor a hippo fits that description. Translators throughout history have left the word untranslated because nothing in the known world fits it. The most natural reading is that Job knew what we would call a sauropod dinosaur. Made on day six. Created the same day as man.

There are stories and carvings of dragons all over the ancient world, on every continent, in cultures that had no contact with each other. How do you explain that apart from a common memory? Man and dinosaurs lived together, because they were made on the same day.

This is the first time in Genesis that God speaks to Himself. The "us" and "our" are not editorial plurals or a conversation with angels. They are the triune God deliberating within Himself before the creation of man. 2 Timothy 1:9 says God's purpose for man was fixed before the world began. Day six did not catch Him off guard.

What does it mean to be made in the image and likeness of God? Henry Morris, the great Baptist scientist, wrote that something about the human body is uniquely suited to God's self-revelation, and so God designed man's body with an erect posture, an upward-gazing countenance, a face capable of expressing emotion, and a brain and tongue capable of articulate speech. But the image goes deeper than that. Man has intellectual capacities no animal shares: the ability to design and create, to appreciate beauty, to compose music, to write, to reason, to be self-conscious. Man can also know the difference between right and wrong. He can worship. Only man can commune with God through prayer. These are the marks of the image.

Man also bears a structural likeness to the Godhead. Within the Trinity there are three persons. Within man there are three parts: body, soul, and spirit. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 lists all three. Hebrews 4:12 says the soul and spirit are divisible. They are not the same thing.

God made man male and female. That is from the beginning, as Jesus Himself said in Matthew 19:4-6. No court ruling and no cultural pressure changes what God did on day six.

Man was commanded to fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over the animals. God is unambiguously pro-life. This command was given to Adam and repeated to Noah. The earth belongs to man as a stewardship under God, and man is to inhabit it and use it.

At the end of day six, God looked at everything He had made. Not good. Not acceptable. Very good. No death, no sin, no disease. Man was in his unfallen state. Lucifer had not yet fallen. It was the world as God intended it, before anything went wrong.

Day Seven: Rest

The seventh day is not like the other six. It does not close with the evening-morning formula. Some have used that to argue that the seventh day is still ongoing. But the Bible does not say God is resting. It says He rested. Past tense. God is not idle now. Isaiah 40:28 says He does not grow weary. He is working still. The Sabbath rest of day seven was not for His benefit. It was for ours.

Exodus 20:8-11 makes this clear. The commandment to rest on the seventh day is grounded in the creation week. Israel was not commanded to rest because they were tired. They were commanded to follow the pattern God established. George Boardman, a Baptist preacher from Pennsylvania in the 1880s, wrote of the French experiment with a ten-day week that ended in failure. The sabbath was made for man, Jesus said (Mark 2:27). Not for Jews only. For man. The body needs rest, and after six days of work is the right time for it.

Six days of creation, and a day of rest. That is how the first chapter of the Bible ends. Not with a theory, not with a philosophical proposition, but with a God who worked and then stopped, and called it finished. It was finished and it was very good.

This is not a debate of science versus faith. It is faith versus faith. You either believe God's Word or you believe man's word. Man's word keeps changing. The Bible does not. When you hold your Bible, you have in your hands the only eyewitness account of the creation of the universe. That witness does not update his testimony.