The evidence which the record furnishes of the third day is express. It is dry land and seas in view of man: in no way the varying phases of either in the geologic ages, but solely the result, after the last disturbance when the waters prevailed everywhere. Indeed a good deal of unfounded hypothesis is now exploded (especially since the recent deep-sea soundings) as to the alternation of the ocean beds and the vast mountain ranges east or west. For though the strata and fossils, marine, lacustrine or fluviatile, and terrestrial, point to repeated submergence and emergence of considerable regions, the continents have abode from Archæan time, the Atlantic flowing on one side, the Pacific on another. During the ages that followed, allow all that can be proved of change by upheaval, oscillation, dislocation, and rock formation, fragmental or crystalline, eruptive or stratified, by means organic mechanical, or chemical, by atmosphere, water, fire or aught else, there were elements of life vegetable and animal brought into being in the waters and on the land, and successively extinguished and new ones created with the changed state of the globe, each period having its appropriate species in the new environment.
But none of these alternations, vast and important as they were physically, enters the scope of the six days. No geologist denies that the mountains, to take this one sample, were elevated substantially as they are, long before the human race; and on mountains depend the springs and rivers and even the due fall of rains, and striking equalization of temperature between the extremist climes, so necessary to man and beast and herb. Very much more indeed had been done by God in that immense preparation, not only in the partially hidden supplies (coal, marble, lime, precious stones, metals, etc.) for man's use, but in enriching the soil and beautifying the surface of the earth in countless ways, working, as He still does, now for instance by sudden volcanic action, and again for example by the slow process of innumerable polyps, yea and mysteriously by their combined action (though one be organic and the other not) in the accomplishment of His creative designs from a time when there was no life here below, till every organized form was there short of man. Now it is exclusively of the human era and its belongings that the six days speak; and none more clearly than the third day, when the vegetable kingdom began, but solely in reference to Adam and those subject to him. The application to geologic time is impossible as proved by the record itself, and the mutual contradictions of all who essay it.
The evidence is no less plain and conclusive as to the fourth day, of which the more prudent advocates for the long-period days say little. But even here, though it be a question of the heavenly orbs, the record looks at them simply in view of man and this earth. “And God said, Let there be light-bearers in [the] expanse of the heavens to divide between the day and between the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; and let them be for light-bearers in [the] expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light for ruling the day, and the lesser light for ruling the night (the stars also). And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide between the light and the darkness. And God saw that [it was] good. And there was evening, and there was morning, a fourth day” (ver. 14-19).
It is a mistake to suppose that during the long ages of vegetable and animal life up to the highest forms, one excepted, there had not been the shining of sun, moon and stars, as well as sea and land and atmosphere though not always quite the same as ours. If geology can trace the proofs of life, and its progress in a typical system, which reveals unity of plan as distinctly as deep and comprehensive wisdom, be it so; but they enjoyed sunlight, heat, air, and water throughout. But here we have everything successively ordered for man, after those immense eras of change were closed, when the last disturbance needed God's interference for a new system. Light was caused to act. The atmosphere as it is followed. Next, the seas were gathered to their own place, and dry land appeared, and the vegetable realm, the work of mountain-making and valley-scooping, shaping as well as storing, having been already and it may be in long successive ages effected. In each case of these days the result seems instantaneous. “He spoke, and it was done.” The work stated here is quite distinct. “The evening and the morning” are the expression of God's considerate goodness to man, responsible to learn of Him and to do His will on the earth, as Christ did perfectly.
It is assuredly not the creation of the sun, etc. This the inspired historian does not say, but only that God now constituted the heavenly luminaries, after the plants and before the animals for the Adamic earth. Light had shone otherwise since the first day of the great week. Now He set the light-bearers of the heavens to do their assigned work, but it is for the earth, and indeed for man. Their creation was implied in ver. 1; for God did not create either empty; and what would heaven be without its host? And we saw that verse 2 implies that the earth even had not been so, though so it became with other marks of disorder. What had hindered the functions of sun and moon was now rectified. Light independently had been proved to be under God's control. On the fourth day He gave the luminaries of heaven their unhindered relation to divide the day from the night. Now we can readily understand the plants (and these were for the use of man and his congeners) caused to spring forth on the day before without the sun-beam; but assuredly not so a geological age of grass, corn, and fruit. Yet we see the fitness of the due ordering of light and heat, as we have it, the next day, if the plants were to flourish, as well as for the animal life that begins after that according to His word.
This is entirely confirmed if we inspect the context more closely. For where would be the sense of the light-bearers “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years” if it had been an age (thousands, myriads, millions of years) before Adam? If on the contrary God was not creating them, but, after that which had intercepted, only “setting” them to their ordained task in immediate view of man, all is clear and consistent. And to whom could this be of such interest as to Israel, the people of His choice, in whose history we have them acting as “signs” on critical occasions for His sovereign will? Without dwelling on His wonders in Egypt where light was in Israel's dwellings, darkness thick in all the rest of the land, or later at Sinai, we see what a sign it was to Israel when Joshua said in their sight, Sun, stand still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon: or in far other days when Jehovah spoke to sick Hezekiah and gave him a sign in the shadow that went back ten steps on the dial of Ahaz. And what a sign again where all was lost, as far as man is concerned, in the cross of Messiah when darkness for three hours covered all the land A mere eclipse was then impossible. Nor will whole clusters of signs be wanting when He comes in power and glory on the clouds of heaven. “For seasons” is needed no comment: man alone on earth understands and appreciates these fit and recurring times. As the same Hebrew word means “the congregation” and “the solemn feast,” as well as the season or appointed time at which they kept it, “seasons” may have a sacred aspect; but the more ordinary sense seems confirmed by what follows. Very little astronomy is requisite to know how “days and years” are defined by them, but only for man. In the ages before him this were all irrelevant. In view of man and Israel especially it is as affecting as full of interest. The constant design is reiterated in “Let them be for light-bearers in the expanse of the heavens.” It was their effeet, not their structure, that is intimated. “And it was so.”
Then we are told that “God made”, not created, “the two great lights.” The language is never varied without purpose. Rosenmüller the younger was an admirable Hebraist, and certainly free enough in his handling of scripture; yet he has no hesitation in his discussion of this question formally, but insists that the genuine force of the construction is not “fiant luminaria” (i.e. let lights be made), but “inserviant in expanso coelorum” (i.e. serve in the expanse of the heavens). He compares the sing. with the plur. of the Hebrew verb for being, and deduces the inference that the language can only express the determination of the luminaries to some fixed uses for the world, and not to their production. Further, it is solely relation to man on earth that demonstrates the strict phraseological propriety of “the two great lights”. He who created all and inspired Moses knew better than Newton or Laplace the sizes of every orb of heaven; but for man's and for Israel's help on earth, to say nothing of every subject creature, what were all the rest for light-giving by day and night compared to the sun and moon?
This again as definitely excludes scientific preoccupation, as it confirms the reference throughout. The stars only come in parenthetically. God made them too, if blind man deified them. But God gave sun and moon to rule over the day and over the night. They were His creatures and gifts for man's use, dividing between the light and the darkness. “And God saw that [it was] good,” not as if they were just created, but the assigned work He gave to be done by them. “And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.” Here it cannot be fairly denied by any, that from the necessary effect of that day's work we have the ordinary vicissitude of night and day; and that a similar diurnal revolution followed for the fifth and sixth days, as for every day since, including the seventh. But this being so, surely consistency requires it for the three previous days. That light was supplied otherwise before the fourth day is no impediment. The daily course of the earth on its axis depends on gravitation, not on illumination, and would have gone on equally, had the sun been only and always opaque, or had its previous and its present action in light-bearing never existed.
And here it may be noticed that those who contend for nothing but the same agencies at work from the first as act now before our eyes, and who go so far as to swell the time into incalculable ages by embracing the fond hypothesis of evolution, so that 300,000,000 years span an inconsiderable period of geological imagination, have now to confront an unexpected and veritable coup de grace from Sir W. Thomson. For he has proved that if the earth existed at all only 100,000,000 years ago, it must have been on scientific grounds a red-hot molten globe altogether incompatible with life animal or vegetable. The geologists in their loose and one-sided way reasoned from the deposition of the enormously deep strata at the present rate of formation. But Thomson founded his far more rigorous calculations on the acknowledged facts of the earth's tidal retardation, as well as of its gradually cooling state. Hence the recent disposition among the less prejudiced men to re-arrange the order and time of formations by the probable contemporaneity of unlike strata. They essay thus to reduce their egregious demands by the supposition that the Cambrian for instance may coalesce chronologically with the Silurian, the former lacustrine, the latter marine; and similarly the Permian with the Jurassic, etc. The groups thus associated would each owe their different phenomena to their respective conditions of deposit.
But those who accept the plain and simple interpretation of the record here offered will observe that, if all these shifting and precarious hypotheses are due to the dim twilight of the science, scripture is responsible for no error. What it asserts remains not only unshaken but indisputably true.