1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.[a] 2 The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.”
And evening passed and morning came, marking the first day.
Genesis 1:1-3
In my last post on this subject I looked at the raw materials God had to work with when creating everything. Quite surprisingly the only raw material is water which somehow seems to have been there without God having yet said or done anything.
Peter says this about how it all happened:
5 They deliberately forget that God made the heavens long ago by the word of his command, and he brought the earth out from the water and surrounded it with water. 6 Then he used the water to destroy the ancient world with a mighty flood. 7 And by the same word, the present heavens and earth have been stored up for fire. They are being kept for the day of judgment, when ungodly people will be destroyed.
2 Peter 3: 5-7
In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth and somehow there is water there from which the earth was brought out.
Back in Genesis 1:3 we see the creation proper starting with “And God said: Let there be light.” We know from John’s gospel that the Word that was spoken with all that creative power is actually Jesus (John 1). When God speaks He manifests His image and in a sense – from our point of view at least – begets His Son. Of course Jesus was always there but He is not manifested to us until God speaks. And the first thing God speaks is “Let there be light.”
Light is also a synonym for understanding – without Jesus we would have no understanding of God so that is the first gift God gives us all.
It should be noted that this light has nothing to do with the sun which isn’t created until the fourth day. This seems counter intuitive – everyone knows that the day starts when the light from the sun appears above the horizon.
However light is fundamentally something different from what we see. Light is part of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum which consists of everything from gamma rays, through x rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared and all the radio waves (HF, VHF, UHF, microwaves, etc.) It is only in the last 150 years that we have been able to use a lot of these waves to communicate, heat our food and see bones under flesh.
These waves all obey the same God given laws. They fundamentally frame everything we do. Space and time are constrained by the speed of light (which is the same as the speed of all the EM waves in a vacuum). Nothing can go faster than it. As you approach the speed of light it always looks to you like it is travelling at the same speed. Eventually time stops when you go that fast. So it is fitting that light frames the first idea of time, that of the day (with no sun involved).
So this first day light is more fundamental than the sun or any other source of light.
A practical application when you are creating anything is to start with making it clear what you are doing. Communication is everything. Unless there is first understanding (light) between all the parties involved nothing else can happen.
God spoke and so must we if we are to create anything.
faithfulwon 
One response to “Biblical Creativity Day 1: The EM Spectrum”
[…] Day 1: We now know that light is a phenomena which has an electric and magnetic component to it mixed in such a way (with a precise range of frequency and wavelength) that we can see it. It is just a small part of a much larger range of similar possible EM phenomena much of which we use in communication. Once light was created, we perceive its absence as night. […]