Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 34:135 (Jul 1877)
Article: An Exposition Of The Original Text Of Genesis I. And II.
Author: Samuel Hopkins

BSac 34:135 (July 1877) p. 422

An Exposition Of The Original Text Of Genesis
I. And II.

Rev. Samuel Hopkins

§ 6. Light

The first potential act of creating is expressed by the divine word, “Let light be.” We know no definition of light so complete, terse, and unexceptionable as that given by a Christian apostle: “Whatsoever doth make manifest is light” (Eph. 5:13). Without any philosophical pretension, it covers all applications of the word. We accept it. We are content with it — the more readily and perfectly, because philosophers themselves have so remarkably failed, differing among themselves in their own definitions. We say, then, that the light here introduced to our notice was the somewhat which made material objects manifest or visible.

“Let light be.” In all languages the verb of existence is more often used to denote some qualified or some local existence than to denote it only in the abstract, or irrelatively. When the verb and its subject stand alone,—without surroundings, precedents, or sequences, — it then denotes

BSac 34:135 (July 1877) p. 423

existence merely. As in the statement “God is,” in distinction from this, “God is good”; or from this, “God is in this place.” In the case before us, the verb and its subject do not stand alone, but with qualifying surroundings. Place and condition of place are its immediate antecedents, essentially qualifying its import: “the waters,” place; the waters in “darkness,” condition of place.

At this point the writer limits himself to the field of this our own world in its then condition — earth-solid and water-deep and darkness. The next statement, therefore, is not that God called light into being, but that he called it to be here — on the face of the waters — in the place where the darkness was. A definite presence, in a definite locality, and in lieu of a definite light-absence, is the simple idea presented. Standing, as the words do, in close sequence to the statement of a contrary and preceding state, they legitimately signify only, let light be in the place of that darkness. They do not present the idea that there was no light in existence; and therefore we have a right to say that there may have been light elsewhere, when upon “the deep” there was none. At least, we have no right to reverse our supposition, and to interpret the phrase as signifying that there was no light elsewhere; no right to suppose that the “thick darkness”— the world’s “swaddling-band”— was “thick” as infinite space. Indeed, the invocation intimates, if it does not signify, that there was light somewhere else, and that the foreign light should come...