If you get an opportunity, search on YouTube for clips from Rob Bell’s video Everything is Spiritual. Better yet, pick up the DVD. You won’t be disappointed. I first saw this video in Spring of this year (2009). In the first part of the movie, Rob goes through the Genesis account, and presents it in a way that I had never considered.
One of the things that Rob points out is a dichotomy present during the first four days of creation:
Day 1: Light <==> Dark
Day 2: Water below (surface) <==> Water above (sky)
Day 3: Land <==> Sea
Day 4: Day <==> Night
Day 4 seems to be a bridge between the first three days, where God was forming the foundations of this world, and the next three days, where he fills what he has already created.
Day 4: God fills the sky with celestial bodies (sun, moon, stars)
Day 5: God fills the sea and the sky with life
Day 6: God commands living creatures to populate the land.
So, in the first three days, there are pairs. Next, there are pairs of days, matching forming with filling (Day 1 with Day 4, Day 2 with Day 5, Day 3 with Day 6).
Even from the very beginning, nothing in creation stood alone. Everything was created in relationship.
* * *
If you look at each day in creation, it ends the same way: “And there was evening, and there was morning”. Obviously this is mirrored by the Jewish custom of marking the ending of one day and the beginning of the next at sundown, as opposed to sunrise (or even more oddly, a somewhat arbitrary moment in the middle of the night).
I’ve always pictured the creation account happening during the day. As each day progressed, there was incredible bursts of light as celestial bodies came into being, and incredibly loud roars as tectonic plates were raised to form shorelines. Instead, it seems to me now that, each morning, this new world awoke with another new foundation, or with a new population. In some ways, it was like a week of Christmas mornings–each day, there was a new gift to behold.
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