In the study of the Genesis account of creation the question above is an important one. How we answer it determines how we respond to the world. One of the main points that is used to argue that the days of creation were twenty-four hour days is drawn from Exodus 20:8-11. When the Lord gives the Sabbath law to the Jews He adds—“Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God” (Exodus 20:8, NKJV). A little further in the text, the Lord explains—“For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.” (20:11). If a “day” meant something different to the Lord than it did for man then the comparison falls apart. It would be comparing “apples with oranges.” The Jews were to do on the seventh day just what the Lord had done on the seventh day. Notice, He declares that God “rested the seventh day” (11b) and “blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it” (11c) and in commanding its observation He reveals to them “the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God” (8). Nehemiah describes this as having “made known to them” His holy Sabbath (Nehemiah 9:14). Although man did not observe the seventh day Sabbath before the command in Exodus, God had “hallowed” it from the beginning. Genesis tells us—“God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because IN IT He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” (Genesis 2:3 emphasis mine). If the seventh day of Genesis was different from the seventh day the Jews were to observe then God did not rest “in it.” 1
This argumentation is sound and inescapable, but there is something else in chapter one of the Genesis account itself that makes it impossible to draw any other conclusion. Notice, in the first day of creation God creates light and separates it from darkness. The text declares—“God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Genesis 1:5). Somehow, God creates light independent of light from the sun. It is not until the fourth day that the sun is created (Genesis 1:14-19). God defines what a “day” is on this first day in the separation of light from darkness. After two additional days of creation, God then creates the sun, moon, and stars and declares the purpose of their creation. The text says—“let them be for signs and seasons, and FOR DAYS and years” (Genesis 1:14b emphasis mine). The definition of “day” was not determined by the placement of the sun in space or the rotation of the earth around it. These heavenly bodies, like time pieces, were put in the heavens “for days and years.” In other words, these were put in the heavens to indicate something that God had already defined.
1 Some argue that the Hebrew writer suggests that the Sabbath of God was not twenty-four hours in his discourse on entering God’s “rest” (Hebrews 4:1-11). However, it should be noted that the writer does not say that God’s rest, which continues to the present, is the “seventh day.” Instead, the writer points out that God’s “works were finished from the foundation of the world.” (Hebrews 11:3).
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