Troublesome Topic: Light From Distant Stars
Genesis 1:4
Translation
And ELOHIM saw that the light
was good.
Paraphrase
And THE CREATOR AND OWNER OF ALL THINGS carefully observed the light, and He was pleased because it was just the way He wanted it.
Light from Distant Stars
God was the source of physical light because the stars had not yet been created. I believe that when He created light, it was coming from everywhere because God is everywhere, therefore it did not have to travel to get anywhere.
But for shadows (i.e. darkness) to be possible, light had to be coming from one place, not from everywhere all at once. We know that the Spirit of God is everywhere, and God the Father is often described as a spirit being, but Jesus is more likely to occupy a specific physical location even while away from this earth. His form or “body” would be different, but He may still be in just one place at one time (however, we do not know for sure). Therefore, if light needed to come from one member of the triune God, and come from one place rather than from everywhere, it is a relatively safe assumption to say that Jesus was the source of that original light.
In my opinion, the blob of matter that would become earth was originally not spinning. God the Father may have been the one to speak light into being, then He assigned it to Jesus who occupied a specific location somewhere, and then set the earth to spinning. Or we could say that Jesus
Go to footnote numberspoke light into being but it came from all three members of the Godhead, therefore, it came from everywhere all at once. Then it was assigned to Jesus in order to create night and day due to shadows. From the perspective of a specific spot on this planet, there was established a time of daylight and a time of darkness.
On day four of creation week Jesus assigned stars and other heavenly bodies as physical sources of the light He had created. The question, “Was there enough time for light to arrive here from distant stars?” is based on the idea of stars always being the source of their light. My point here is that they could not be the source of light because light was created three days earlier than they were! Therefore Jesus was the source of light and then He assigned it to the heavenly bodies. There was no need to wait for light from the stars to get where it was going because it was already everywhere since it had started out being everywhere all at once.
The next lesson is: Evening and Morning
Footnotes
1
We know that the members of the Trinity worked closely together during creation, but we don’t know exactly what role each one took. For instance, we are not sure which one spoke things into being; some people think it was Jesus, some people think it was God the Father. It does not matter which one did it, and God did not think it was necessary to make clear to us who did it. Also, the topic of the Trinity is a tricky one; we must keep God united as God, but at the same time there appear to be three “persons” of God. An extreme position which ignores the other side of the issue is going to be wrong. I include two possibilities in my explanation in order to let the reader know that there is more than one option and we do not have enough information to determine clearly which option is the true one.