God spoke and called these things by name. When something is given a name it is imbued with a type of power. Each of these clearly has a power. Light has the power to give life and Darkness clearly has the power to take it. God speaks with a purpose, we have to figure that purpose out.
Evening and morning were a Day, but the light was also called Day. This word is YOM in Hebrew. There are many in the church who try to claim that Yom is a 24 hour time period and all creation was completed in a 6 day week of 24 hours. One problem. Right here in verse 5 it says that the light was a Yom as well as the morning and evening was a Yom. In this passage it clearly delineates two totally different things and calls them by the same exact word. Why is this?
If you understand Hebrew you can see that the word Yom has many different meanings, from day to time, to year to a thousand years, and many things in between. But the real factor is to just open your eyes and read, for many times even in the English you can see a problem in the text.
As a translator, I don't want to assume the writer meant something he didn't and I also don't want to misread the text. I want to glean all I can from it while preserving the integrity of the text. Here we can clearly see there is no 24 hour period being spoken of. First, there is no Sun and Moon to delineate time into a 24 hour segment. Second, since the same word is used in the same passage in seemingly two different usages we have to consider that maybe the word Yom could mean something besides a 24 hour time period that we think of.
At the Big Bang, when all that we know of sprang forth from the Word of God, Time as we know it began. But what was it then and how did it operate. While most scientists would propose that time has been unchanging since it began, there is a theory that time was stretched or bent and that while great expanses of time in today's time were traversed by creation, it all fell into 6, 24 hour days. However, as with all theories, they are just that, theories until proven by facts.
In studying all the scientific theories during my life, I tend to keep all of them where they belong, as theories, not facts. Some more interesting than others. You see, as one tends to hold dear to only certain "facts" as opposed to "theories" you can keep from getting drawn off into mindless discussions which leads to nowhere and you are able to keep an open mind on most subjects and keep theories where they are able to be thrown away when proved wrong or re-catagorized into the fact department if needed.
I want to know the truth as bad as any man, but I cannot swallow most of what is passed off as facts about "creation" from the church. The church as a whole doesn't read the text in Hebrew and most are woefully ignorant of the sciences. A Yom here is some measure of Time, but who knows what it is. I wasn't there to see first hand, but we are able to measure time scientifically and we know that a 12 or 24 hour time period was not the same today as it was then. Just one example is that we know that the earth's rotation is slower today than it was yesterday, etc. Armed just with the fact that the Earth is slowing lets me know that Yom is not a 24 hour day here.
© 2009 Roy Blizzard III
