GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
GENESIS 1:17-19
17 And God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to rule the day and to rule the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
Here on the fourth day of creation, God set the luminaries into their positions, giving each one its momentum, its spin, its orbit, and all of the component parts, gases, minerals, or other things to make each one serve his purposes. And here again, we are reminded of those purposes: “to rule the day and to rule the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.” Earlier, he also commanded that they would serve as signs for seasons, days, and years, for as we all know, “the moon is never but a month old.”
The luminaries continue to do what God commanded them to do: “Sun and moon and stars, shining and sent forth for service, are obedient.” We see evidence of this in our own solar system, as the sun, our moon, the planets and their moons move in the regular and predictable ballet of their movements. We can assume or predict that the planets orbiting other stars also follow regular and predictable movements. The best evidence we have for this is in this verse, that “God set them in the expanse of the sky.” Today, telescopes explore distant solar systems and catalogue their planets. At the time of this writing, the list of identified exoplanets (planets in other star systems) numbers about six thousand. We can presume that they follow the same laws of motion that Earth, Mars and Saturn obey.
Sailors and explorers in Luther’s time (the age of discovery) found the plants, animals and people in new places were mostly similar to the flora, fauna and faces of their homelands. But sometimes they found llamas, turkeys, potatoes, and what today we call corn. These things may have shocked a few people, but they are not so very alien, after all. Perhaps this is a faint echo of the thought that the distant stars and their worlds may not be so very different from our own.
At the close of verse 18, Moses tells us, “God saw that it was good.” This is the fourth of seven times this is recorded in the creation account. Even though the act of creation was incomplete, it was good, it was right, and it was according to his holy will. God is not a man, that he should lie, or sin (Numbers 23:19). Therefore when God sees that his creation was good, we know that this goodness is an absolute; there was no flaw, no imperfection in what God made.
The day ends as the others have: “There was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.” He invites us to think of the sunset, and of the approach of the next day’s dawning. These were actual days; the first of their kind, and we can well imagine the glory of this evening, the first true sunset ever to take place. The new sun sank in the sky, and there alone was God to watch it, surrounded by the perfect peace of his creation, perhaps the angels, and above, ever brightening as the darkness descended, the stars proclaimed the glory of God.
But now, this evening was of a new kind. The light of the previous days was ended or overlit with the light of the sun we now know. The evening saw some phase of moonrise or dimmer light above the clouds. From this evening onward into all evenings, men and women since the creation have looked upward into the sky when the hard labor of the day has ended, and sighed, and have something thought, “My loved one sees the same moon tonight. Is she thinking of me?” Antonín Dvořák’s lines from “Rusalka” come to mind:
Moon high and deep in the sky / Your light travels far,
You travel around the wide world / and see into people’s homes.
Moon, stand still a little while / and tell me where is my dear.
We are blessed by God with the gifts of the sun, moon, and stars. They are always a spectacle of God’s glory. As the ancient writer Sirach put it, “The glory of the stars is the beauty of heaven, a gleaming array in the heights of the Lord. At the command of the Holy One they stand as ordered, they never relax in their watches.” Greater still is the glory of the unfailing sun, “God shall be truly known…Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, his honor and the greatness of his name shall be” (Henry VIII Act V:5).
Gravity, heat, light, weather, seasons, the fragrance of the flowers and the blossoms of the trees, the sweetness of new snow and summer dew, the swaying patterns of the grass, corn, and wheat in the late afternoon breeze, the patterns of sunlight and moonlight on water and through shifting leaves in the trees; all of this and so much more comes with the blessings of this fourth day, compounded atop the blessings of the previous days. Each day’s blessings only add to what we have been blessed with before, and God’s compassionate blessings “are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:23). These blessings of God’s compassion shine most brightly in the forgiveness of our sins through Jesus. The terrible darkness of his crucifixion was not brought on by any sunset, coming as it did at high noon on that Friday. His blood was spilled to cover over the guilt of our sins, eclipsing as it were the darkness of the devil’s worst work with the unending brightness of God’s love. May the lesson of the sunrise repeat again and again: Today is a new day in Christ, a day to give him thanks with my life.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Archives at St Paul’s Lutheran Church https://splnewulm.org/daily-devotions/ and Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: www.wlchapel.org/connect-grow/ministries/adults/daily-devotions/gwfy-archive/2026
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Genesis 1:17-19 to rule over day and night