God's Clockwork and the Dethroned Gods Text: Genesis 1:14-19
Introduction: Putting the Gods in Their Place
We come now to the fourth day of creation, and we must understand that Moses is not simply giving us a sequential list of manufacturing steps. He is continuing his polemical assault on the entire religious worldview of the ancient world, and by extension, the modern world. Man is a religious creature, and if he will not worship the Creator, he will inevitably worship the creation. And what part of the creation has man been more consistently tempted to worship than the heavens? The sun, the moon, the stars, they have been the central characters in virtually every pagan pantheon. The Egyptians had Ra, the sun god. The Mesopotamians had Sin, the moon god. The Canaanites worshipped Baal, often associated with the sun. The Romans had Sol and Luna. And modern man, who imagines himself so sophisticated, still has his horoscopes in the newspaper, a pathetic remnant of the same old stellar idolatry.
The pagan world saw the cosmos as alive with capricious, divine forces. The sun and moon were not objects; they were deities to be placated, feared, and worshipped. Their movements were the dramas of the gods, often violent and arbitrary. Into this world of cosmic terror and superstition, the fourth day of creation speaks with the force of a divine demotion. God does not fight the sun god. He makes the sun. He does not negotiate with the moon goddess. He makes the moon, and tells it what to do. The stars are not the distant, controlling fates of men. They are an afterthought, a casual sprinkle of glory. "He made the stars also."
What we are reading here is the great dethronement. God is taking the deities of the nations, stripping them of their imaginary crowns, and hanging them in the sky as lamps and clocks. He is declaring that the heavens are not divine; they are divine handiwork. They are not to be worshipped; they are to be used. They are not objects of fear, but objects of function. This is the foundation of true science. You cannot have astronomy until you dethrone astrology. You cannot study the stars as objects until you stop worshipping them as gods. The fourth day is God clearing the heavens of all rivals, establishing His absolute sovereignty, and giving us a world that is orderly, predictable, and designed for a purpose.
The Text
Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so. So God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and also the stars. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
(Genesis 1:14-19 LSB)
A World with a Job Description (vv. 14-15)
The creation of the heavenly bodies begins, as always, with the sovereign Word of God, and it comes with a detailed job description.
"Then God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth'; and it was so." (Genesis 1:14-15 LSB)
Notice the structure. We are on Day Four. This corresponds directly to Day One. On Day One, God created light and separated it from the darkness. Now, on Day Four, He fills that created realm with the instruments that will govern that separation. The pattern of forming and filling continues its majestic, logical procession. God is a God of order, not of confusion.
But look at the assigned task. These lights have a fourfold function. First, they are to separate the day from the night, to rule the distinction God made on Day One. Second, they are for signs. This does not mean astrology. It means that God uses the heavens to mark significant events in His redemptive plan. The rainbow was a sign. The plagues were signs. And the most famous stellar sign was the star that led the Magi to the Christ child. The heavens declare the glory of God, and sometimes they declare the specific activity of God.
Third, they are for seasons. The Hebrew here is moedim. This is a crucial word. It is the same word used throughout the Old Testament for the appointed feasts of Israel, the sacred assemblies, the liturgical calendar. The sun and moon are not just an agricultural clock for planting and harvesting; they are a liturgical clock. The entire cosmos is designed to call God's people to worship at the appointed times. The universe has a rhythm, and that rhythm is worship. The sun and moon are the celestial choirmasters, telling the covenant community when it is time to gather and sing.
Fourth, they are for days and years. They are God's great clock and calendar. They provide the structure for our work, our rest, and our lives. They are servants, given to man to help him exercise his dominion over the earth. They are not our masters; they are our tools. And their final purpose is summed up: "to give light on the earth." Their orientation is downward, toward us. They are not self-referential deities, concerned with their own glory. They are created instruments, designed to serve God's purposes on earth.
Nameless Servants (v. 16)
In verse 16, God gets to the manufacturing process, and in doing so, He continues His polemic with a brilliant subtlety.
"So God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and also the stars." (Genesis 1:16 LSB)
God made them. They are artifacts. They are not eternal, not self-existent. They had a beginning. But notice what they are called: "the greater light" and "the lesser light." They are not given their proper names. The Hebrew word for sun was shemesh, and the word for moon was yareach. But these were also the names of pagan deities in the surrounding cultures. Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, refuses to use these names. It is an act of deliberate, theological snubbing. He will not even dignify them with the names their worshippers used. They are simply God's big lamp and God's small lamp. This is a direct slap to the face of every sun and moon cult then or now.
And then comes that magnificent, dismissive phrase: "and also the stars." As an aside. As an afterthought. The countless galaxies, the nebulae, the quasars, the celestial wonders that fill our modern telescopes, all of which were objects of intense pagan worship, are mentioned in passing. God is not showing off; He is simply stating a fact. While men were building entire religions around a handful of visible stars, the God of the Bible created all of them with a word, as a sort of add-on to His primary work of lighting the earth. This is the difference between the Creator and the creature. It is an infinite distance.
Placed, Purposed, and Praised (vv. 17-18)
God does not just make things; He puts them where they belong and reaffirms their purpose.
"And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good." (Genesis 1:17-18 LSB)
God placed them. The Hebrew verb is simple: He gave them. He set them there. They did not wander into their orbits. They were put there. This is the foundation of all science. The universe is intelligible because it was placed by an intelligent designer. The laws of physics are trustworthy because the Lawgiver is trustworthy. The planets move in predictable paths because God put them on those paths. The secularist wants the predictability without the Placer, the law without the Lawgiver, which is like wanting to read a book with no author.
Their purpose is restated: to give light, to rule, to separate. This is delegated authority. The sun does not have inherent authority; it is a viceroy, a governor, ruling on behalf of the true King. Its rule is a blessing, a gift to the earth. And because it does its job, because it fulfills its created purpose in perfect obedience, God pronounces His verdict: "it was good." The machinery of the cosmos is not flawed. The design is perfect. The goodness of creation is affirmed again. The problem in the world is not with God's hardware, but with man's rebellious software.
The Unwavering Rhythm (v. 19)
The day concludes with the now-familiar refrain, establishing the unshakeable rhythm of God's work.
"And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day." (Genesis 1:19 LSB)
Again, this is a literal, 24-hour day, defined by one cycle of evening and morning. Those who try to stuff the eons of secular geology into this word "day" are not just twisting a word; they are breaking the pattern. They are destroying the beautiful, symmetrical, liturgical structure of the creation week in order to make peace with a worldview that is fundamentally at war with Genesis 1. The Sabbath command in Exodus 20 is meaningless if God did not create in six literal days and rest on the seventh. God is establishing the pattern for our week, our work, and our worship.
The evening and the morning mark the passage of a real day. This is history, not poetry. God is working in time, creating a world that will unfold in time. The rhythm is steady, relentless, and purposeful, just like the God who is establishing it.
The Sun and the Son
The fourth day of creation, like all of Scripture, ultimately points us to Christ. The dethronement of the pagan gods of the sky was a preparation for the enthronement of the one true Lord of the sky. The physical lights are created things, but they are pointers to the uncreated Light.
John tells us that the true Light, which gives light to every man, was coming into the world (John 1:9). That light is the Logos, the Word through whom all things, including the sun, were made. The sun is a magnificent creature, but it is just a creature. It is a lampstand. Christ is the Light itself. As the prophet Malachi declared, for those who fear God's name, "the Sun of righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings" (Malachi 4:2).
The sun rules the day, but its rule is temporary. It sets every evening. The Son of Righteousness, Jesus Christ, has risen from the dead, and His rule is eternal. He is the light of the new creation. In the New Jerusalem, the saints "will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will illumine them" (Revelation 22:5). The purpose of the greater light is to get us through this age, to point us toward the age to come when we will have no need of it, because we will have its Creator, face to face.
Therefore, we are to look at the sun, the moon, and the stars not with the superstitious fear of the pagans, but with the grateful praise of the redeemed. We see them and we do not worship them. We see them and we worship the One who made them, the one who is the true and everlasting Light, the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the great light, and He is the good ruler, and in His light, we see light.