Making Sense of Genesis 1 – Creation and Contentions With Modern Science

Literal history or ancient myth? When it comes to Genesis 1, those tend to be your options. But both miss something crucial.

For most people, Genesis sits in an awkward place. If you grew up religious, you might have been taught to defend it against science. If you grew up secular, you probably learned to see it as the kind of story smart people outgrow. Either way, the assumption is the same: Genesis and modern cosmology are locked in a zero-sum game where one wins and the other loses.

(*The is an excerpt from “Does the Universe Paint God Out of the Picture?” by Luke Baxendale. This is part one of four in the book.)

But what if that entire framing is wrong? What if Genesis was never meant to be a rival explanation to scientific cosmology, but something else entirely? The ancient Hebrews weren’t doing physics. They were doing something far more foundational: they were making a claim about the nature of reality itself, about whether the universe has an intelligible order that points beyond itself.

That’s the lens I want to bring to this chapter. Not “Does Genesis match the Big Bang?” but “What is Genesis actually claiming about the cosmos, and does that claim still stand after everything we’ve learned?” Because if we can recover what Genesis was originally saying, we might find it speaks more directly to our lives than we ever imagined. The goal isn’t to merge theology and science into some awkward hybrid, but to let each speak clearly so we can hear what they’re actually saying, and whether they might be pointing toward the same underlying truth.

I didn’t always see it this way. As a young teenager reading Genesis 1 for the first time, I was captivated by its poetry but troubled by its apparent contradictions. Where does the light come from on the first three days if the sun isn’t created until day four? How can there be evening and morning without the sun? And what about this “firmament” separating the waters? Last time I checked, there isn’t a solid dome holding back the rain. The seven-day timeline seemed irreconcilable with everything I knew about the Big Bang, the gradual formation of stars and galaxies, and billions of years of evolutionary history. I began to wonder how I could make sense of both perspectives, and whether it was even possible to do so.

As I began to voice those concerns, it became clear that I was far from alone. Many thoughtful readers had felt the same tension and had tried to address it in different ways. Over time I came to see three broad approaches that show up in the church:

1. Young Earth Creationism: The “days” in Genesis are understood as ordinary 24-hour days, so creation (and therefore the age of the earth) is dated to only thousands of years ago, often around 6000-7000 years based on biblical genealogies and a straightforward reading of the sequence.
2. Old Earth Creationism: The “days” are taken as longer, non-literal spans (or as God’s workdays described in human terms), which allows the creation account to fit with an ancient cosmos and modern geological findings; some supporters point to passages like 2 Peter 3:8 to show that biblical language can use “day” flexibly: “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”
3. Framework view: The interpretation that Genesis 1 uses the six days as a literary structure rather than as a strict chronological sequence of material events; on this view, the text aims to proclaim who the Creator is and what creation means, using a pattern (for example, forming realms and then filling them) that would have communicated powerfully in its ancient context.

It was that last approach that really opened the door for me. It suggested that before we ask Genesis to answer modern scientific questions, we should first ask what it was communicating in its own ancient setting. John H. Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One is especially helpful here. In this book, he argues that when we read Genesis through the lens of ancient Near Eastern culture and cosmology, layers of meaning come into focus that many modern readers naturally miss. My aim in this section is to show that a large share of the supposed conflict between Genesis and contemporary science isn’t resolved by downgrading either one, but by listening more carefully to what each is actually trying to say.

Contextualising Creation: Exploring Biblical Meanings in an Ancient Framework

Within Scripture, one of the most basic claims about God is that He is the Creator. To say that God created the world is to say that reality is not accidental, that existence is not some blind cosmic fluke. You and I are not a coincidence. The world is charged with purpose, and that single conviction quietly reshapes how we understand ourselves, our responsibilities, and the kind of place we live in.

It also raises a further set of questions. If God is Creator, then what exactly does that imply about the nature of the world itself? Is the universe, at the deepest level, a self-contained machine, running on its own, or as something more like a home, a place in which God intends to dwell with His creatures? And what sort of text is the creation account meant to be? Is it describing a literal manufacturing sequence, or communicating something more conceptual about God, order, and meaning?

Genesis 1 is where this vision takes shape. It’s one of the most debated passages in all of Scripture, and it’s not hard to see why. The chapter sounds straightforward, but it is anything but transparent.

A good first step is to remember who Genesis was written for. It was not addressed directly to modern readers; it was given to ancient Israel, and through Israel to the wider world. That means it speaks in the idioms, assumptions, and mental furniture of an ancient people. If we want to hear what the text is actually saying, we have to do the patient work of crossing that cultural and linguistic distance.

This is why translation is never only about swapping words. Real understanding involves stepping into the world behind the words, because language and culture are woven together. Biblical ideas do not float free of history; they come wrapped in the lived realities of the people who first heard them. Our task is to carry those ideas into our context without letting our modern assumptions and biases twist the original meaning.

Hospitality provides a simple illustration. In the ancient world, hospitality was not a polite extra but a moral obligation, sometimes treated as sacred duty. When Abraham welcomes three strangers in Genesis 18, he is meeting a serious social expectation that includes food, shelter, and protection. Now compare that to today. Most of us would think twice (or three times) before inviting strangers into our homes. It feels unsafe, even foolish. To understand the biblical lessons on hospitality, we need to appreciate its cultural significance in the ancient Middle Eastern world.

The same principle applies to Genesis 1. If we want to understand it properly, we need to step back into the world in which it emerged: the ancient Near East, with its own assumptions, symbols, and ways of making sense of reality. That means reading the biblical text closely, but also paying attention to the broader cultural landscape that surrounded it.

This kind of comparison needs a careful balance. We should not expect every ancient text to sound the same simply because it comes from the same region and period. Yet we also should not assume Israel existed in a vacuum. The Bible is distinctive in its portrayal of God and His relationship with His people, and it often cuts against the grain of its neighbours. Egyptian literature, for instance, frequently centres on the afterlife and the ordering of society under the gods, whereas Mesopotamian and Babylonian accounts often feature dramatic divine politics, heroic kings, and cosmic conflict. Even so, these cultures shared broad patterns of thought about the divine, the world, and human purpose, and those shared patterns form part of the background against which Genesis speaks.

Kingship provides a concrete example of why this background matters. In much of the ancient Near East, kings were not merely administrators. They embodied divine authority and were often viewed as appointed mediators between the gods and the people. Israel shared aspects of that general outlook, but the biblical portrait of kingship is notably more grounded and, at times, sharply critical. The kings of Israel are judged, not flattered. They are accountable to God’s covenant, not treated as semi-divine figures beyond question.

Yet if we want to understand what kingship meant to Israel, which comparison makes more sense: looking at Egypt and Babylon, or looking at modern democracies and constitutional monarchies? Obviously, the ancient cultures. This is because Israel, Egypt, and Babylon were all part of the ancient Near East, sharing similar social, economic, and political contexts. Modern political systems evolved through centuries of change that ancient Israelites never experienced.

And to be clear, our goal in studying ancient literature is not to determine if Israel took ideas from the texts familiar to them. Instead, we recognise that there were common beliefs throughout the ancient world. Our interest lies not in how Israel was influenced by its neighbours, but in acknowledging that Israel was an integral part of this broader cultural environment.

Genesis One: Understanding Cosmology Through an Ancient Lens

So what happens when we bring that approach to Genesis 1? In a sense, everything changes, because we start reading the chapter on its own terms. Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology, and that is not a flaw to be apologised for but a feature to be understood. Modern cosmology uses physics to describe the universe’s origin, evolution, and large-scale structure. Ancient cosmology, especially in the biblical text, is doing something quite different. It makes a theological claim about who God is, what the world is for, and what it means for human beings to inhabit it. It is, in that sense, a map of meaning.

Once we recognise that difference, a great deal of pressure falls away. Genesis 1 does not need to compete with modern science, because it is not trying to do what modern science does. It is not a rival explanation in scientific clothing. That helps us make sense of details that otherwise feel strange. Without telescopes or modern astronomy, the Israelites did not know that the earth travels through space, or that the sun and moon sit at vastly different distances. They held beliefs about the cosmos that simply weren’t accurate, but God doesn’t pause the narrative to correct them, because correcting their science was never the point.

I know how easily modern readers slip into the wrong lane, because I did it myself. As a teenager I tried to locate the Big Bang in “Let there be light”, to align the six days with geological epochs, and to find evolution tucked away in the phrasing. That approach has a name, concordism. It tries to translate Genesis into modern scientific categories, as though the text must secretly be saying what we now know through cosmology, geology, and biology. This is an attempt to “translate” the culture and text for the modern reader. However, the issue is that we cannot, nor should we, translate their cosmology into ours. John H. Walton clarifies why:

“If we accept Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, then we need to interpret it as ancient cosmology rather than translate it into modern cosmology. If we try to turn it into modern cosmology, we are making the text say something that it never said. It is not just a case of adding meaning (as more information has become available) it is a case of changing meaning. Since we view the text as authoritative, it is a dangerous thing to change the meaning of the text into something it never intended to say.”^[i]

Seen this way, forcing Genesis 1 into alignment with modern science does not elevate it, it distorts its intent. The chapter is not trying to brief ancient Israelites on astrophysics, atmospheric science, or planetary formation. By speaking their language, literally and figuratively, God could highlight deeper truths without burying them beneath scientific details that neither they, nor frankly we, would fully grasp. Nowhere does the Bible step outside the scientific understanding of its own time.

So how did ancient people picture the cosmos? Their “cosmic geography” grew from ordinary observation and reasonable inference. They didn’t have the scientific tools we have today, so if water comes down, well, surely there must be some up there, so they all thought in terms of cosmic waters in the sky. And if it doesn’t come down all the time, then it makes sense to think that something must hold the water back, something somewhat solid. Many ancient civilisations believed in the existence of a solid dome or vault that enclosed the Earth, known as the firmament. Similarly, noticing that water also springs from the earth led them to imagine that there must be great waters beneath us as well. To explain the stability of the earth amidst these waters, they came up with ideas like the earth floating on a cosmic ocean or being held up by giant pillars. They were not being stupid; they were doing the best they could with what they could see.

It is also worth noting that the way we think about the “natural” world today is shaped by a modern mindset that separates the natural from the supernatural. But in the ancient Near East, including Israel, that division barely exists. Their world wasn’t neatly sectioned into biology here and the divine over there; instead, the sacred pulsed through every facet of existence. There was no idea of “natural laws” quietly churning away, indifferent to the god’s or God. Anything that happened, from rain shower (Leviticus 26:4), healthy crops, a child’s birth (Genesis 1:28), was seen as the direct expression of divine will; they were blessings, consequences, tangible moments of God’s involvement. Even the chaos of storms or earthquakes was often read as divine speech or judgment (Nahum 1:3-5). The cosmos wasn’t some machine running on autopilot; it persisted only because God was actively sustaining it. Let God withdraw, and their world would unravel straight into chaos.

With that in view, in Christian thought science is not competing with God. It is describing the world at a different level, and for that very reason it can still tell us something true about Him. The laws and mechanisms science uncovers are not replacements for God, but the consistent patterns of His governance, revealing the brilliance of a God who designed the universe to operate as it does. So when we explain how rainfall forms, how organisms reproduce, or how gravity shapes motion, we are not implying those processes stand on their own. And the more we discover how coherent and intelligible that order is, the more plausible it can seem that we are seeing not a cosmic accident, but the outworking of intention. And that connects to something else that is easy to miss: the world is not only orderly, it is describable. The laws of nature show themselves through mathematics, as though reality has intelligibility built into it. Einstein once remarked, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” What Einstein found incomprehensible was this correspondence between human reason and cosmic reality. Why should abstract mathematical concepts conceived in our minds match the fundamental patterns of nature? The universe could have been messy, random, or based on principles forever hidden from us. Yet instead, it follows elegant “rules”—laws that our minds are somehow able to grasp. The same equations that describe an apple falling from a tree also predict the orbits of planets and even the warping of spacetime near black holes. For Einstein, this hinted at something deeper: a harmony, an underlying rational structure to reality itself. And he was not the first to notice. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had written in The Assayer that the universe is like a great book, “continually open to our gaze,” but one written in the language of mathematics, a language we must learn if we hope to read it. That fit between mind and world does not compel belief on its own, but it does sit naturally alongside the idea that reality arises from something rational, purposeful, and mind-like. As John Lennox famously said, “The existence of laws of physics… strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures that the physical realm conforms to them.”

The ancient Hebrews intuited this same reality, though they expressed it differently. They would never have considered addressing how things might have come into existence from a “natural” scientific perspective. They were not trying to separate “natural process” from “divine action” as if those were competing explanations. That is why Genesis 1:24 can say, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures”, and the next verse can still conclude, “So God made the animals.” To modern ears that can sound like two different accounts. In the ancient setting it is a layered affirmation: creation is fruitful and active, and God stands behind that fruitfulness as its ultimate source.

The Function-Centric Approach of Ancient Cosmology

Understanding this ancient mindset opens the door to recognising how differently they conceived of creation itself. Ancient cosmology was profoundly function-oriented, not material-focused. For those societies, existence was defined less by what something was made of, and more by the role it played within the larger order of things.

Consider the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish—one of the oldest known literary works. Its central drama is order set against chaos, embodied in Marduk’s conflict with Tiamat. When Marduk overcomes her and forms the world from her remains, the point is not simply that “stuff” is produced, but that a workable structure is imposed upon what was unruly. Even humanity’s purpose is framed accordingly: humans exist to serve the gods and sustain the ordered life of society. In other words, the narrative is concerned with what the world is for.

A similar logic appears in ancient Egypt. The cosmos is imagined as a delicately balanced system in which each deity presides over some domain of natural or social life, and human ritual is not superstition so much as maintenance. Ceremonies, offerings, festivals, and the pharaoh’s role as the gods’ earthly representative all serve to keep the world stable and fruitful. Creation, on this view, is inseparable from order that can be preserved.

Set that beside the default modern instinct. We tend to define what is real by what is materially present: atoms, molecules, mechanisms, measurable properties. Creation, in that imagination, looks like the assembly of physical components, as though the deepest question is always “what is it made of?” But the older world often used a different yardstick: to exist fully was to have a recognised place within an ordered whole. Without a function, something could be present and yet, in the most important sense, not really “there.”

You can see the difference in ordinary language. We speak quite naturally of creating things that are not material at all, i.e. a curriculum, a legal framework, a panic, a tradition, a masterpiece. A curriculum may later be printed, but its “creation” is primarily an act of organising, integrating, and directing ideas. If a thing’s ontology is functional, then to create it is to confer its function.

Even something as basic as water illustrates the point. Today, we reduce it to H₂O—a sterile chemical formula. For ancient people, water was more readily known through what it did: it cleansed, sustained life, renewed the land, and marked boundaries between the habitable and the threatening. It “existed” in the richest sense because of its life-giving agency within the world.

Or think of an orchestra. You can manufacture every instrument and place them in a room, and something physical is certainly present. But an orchestra, as an orchestra, only comes alive when those instruments are ordered towards performance: music written, parts assigned, a conductor coordinating, an audience receiving what is played. Along the way, you can point to several stages of “existence,” but a functional worldview places special weight on the moment when scattered potential becomes a unified performance.

This is why so many ancient cosmologies begin with a depiction of primordial disorder: an unformed, undifferentiated expanse that is, in practical terms, unusable. Egyptian traditions speak of Nun, the primeval waters, from which the first stable ground emerges. Sumerian accounts imagine earth and sky fused in a murky unity before any structure, resources, or settled life can appear. Greek mythology’s Chaos also describes the same “formless void” from which deities and order gradually emerged.

Across these cultures, creation involves moving from disorder to an organised system, often through the intervention of divine or supernatural forces. Crucially, Egyptian texts designate these primeval waters as “non-existent”—revealing their functional ontology too. The waters were physically present but lacked purpose, and therefore lacked true existence.

What also marks these ancient stories is their preoccupation with separation, particularly with dividing heaven from earth. In Egyptian mythology, this act is attributed to Shu, the god of air and light. Shu separates Nut (the sky goddess) from Geb (the earth god), creating space for life to flourish between them. Mesopotamian mythology follows the same pattern. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk divides Tiamat’s body to establish the boundary between heaven and earth. The Sumerians also imagined an initial unified chaos where earth and sky were indistinguishable until divine forces intervened to separate them.

The upshot is that, in many ancient Near Eastern accounts, creation is not primarily “stuff appearing from nothing.” The raw material is often already there, but it is unbounded, uninhabitable, and incoherent. True creation is the imposition of order and purpose, the transformation of the inchoate into the intelligible.

That contrasts sharply with the modern Western habit of mind. We obsess over physical substance and origins, dissecting the world into manageable pieces and analysing how things came to be. We study the cosmos as if it were a machine. But in doing so, we lose sight of what ancient myths grasped intuitively: that to truly exist is to have purpose within an ordered, living system. While we ask “how,” they asked “who” and “why.” To them, the cosmos wasn’t a machine to be dissected but a kingdom or temple, ruled by intention and relationship. The material was always secondary to the meaningful.

Purpose Takes Precedence: The Function-Oriented Cosmology of Genesis 1

With that framework in mind, Genesis is not stepping outside ancient Near Eastern thought so much as speaking through it. Israel shared the same basic conceptual world as its neighbours, where “creation” meant bringing order, roles, and stability to what was unusable. Yet Genesis offers a radically distinctive account of who orders the world, why it is ordered, and what that ordering is for.

The familiar opening, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…”, is a good place to see this. The traditional rendering “In the beginning God created…” can sound like a standalone, absolute statement about a metaphysical first moment. But the Hebrew term בְּרֵאשִׁית (berēʾšît) most naturally functions as a dependent expression, closer to “When God began to create…” or “In the initial period when God set about creating…” That isn’t grammatical trivia. It changes the feel of the passage. Rather than announcing a single philosophical “time zero,” the text presents creation as a process, one in which God brings the cosmos into ordered operation through a series of acts. Genesis 1 unfolds as a sequence of distinctions and assignments (light and darkness, sea and land, seasons and days, realms and their inhabitants). The narrative’s momentum is not “matter appears,” but “a world becomes liveable.” This translation sets our expectations the right way. Instead of looking for a single, once-for-all “moment of beginning,” we’re primed to follow the sequence of God’s ordering work through the chapter.

The same clarification applies to the verb “create.” The Hebrew verb בָּרָא (bārā) stands out because it is used only of God in the Old Testament. It describes God’s act of bringing something new with purpose. When David prays, “Create in me a clean heart” (Psalm 51:10), he is not asking for a new organ but for a transformed inner reality. When Isaiah speaks of God “creating” Israel (Isaiah 43:1), the focus is identity, vocation, and destiny. Walton goes as far as to say that within the Old Testament, no clear example explicitly demands a material perspective for the verb. To ancient Israelites, “bārā” implied setting everything in its rightful place for a specific function within God’s design. This is the most literal understanding.

This is why the condition described in Genesis 1:2 is so important. The earth is tōhû wābōhû (תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ), often rendered “formless and void,” but elsewhere these words depict desolation, disintegration, and a collapse of ordered life (for example, Isaiah 34:11; Jeremiah 4:23). Isaiah 45:18 presses the point even harder: God did not form the earth to be tōhû, but shaped it to be inhabited. In other words, tōhû is not “non-existence” in a material sense; it is the absence of a habitable, purposeful world.

Put together, the opening of Genesis reads like a functional origin story in the strongest sense. Walton offers an insightful translation of Genesis 1:1: “In the initial period, God created by assigning functions throughout the heavens and the earth, and this is how He did it.”  The initial problem is not that nothing exists, but that what exists has not yet become a world. It lacks boundaries, stability, and the conditions necessary for life. The creative work that follows addresses exactly that: God separates, names, assigns, and places, transforming what is unformed and nonfunctional into a cosmos ordered for habitation. Genesis, then, stands alongside its ancient neighbours in recognising that creation is the triumph of order over disorder, while insisting that this ordering is not the outcome of conflict or accident, but the deliberate act of one sovereign God.

Dawn of Creation: Exploring the First Three Days of Genesis

With the right lens in place, we can stop debating abstractions and simply read the chapter as it stands. Genesis 1 reads as a sequence of God ordering the world into working form, so the next question is what functions does God establish?

That brings us to the creation days themselves. The first three days show God setting up the basic domains and rhythms of a habitable world.

Day One (Genesis 1:3-5)

On the first day of creation, God introduced light. The account concludes in verse 5: “God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness He called ‘night.’ And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” Unlike our modern conception of light as photons and waves, the ancient Israelites perceived light and darkness as conditions or periods. When God brought forth light on the first day, the emphasis was on organising and defining these states by naming them “day” and “night”.

That matters because what God names is not “light” in the abstract but “day,” which naturally means a span of time. In other words, “light” in this context can be read as shorthand for “the time of light.” This is a common rhetorical move (often called metonymy), where a word stands in for something closely associated with it. Read that way, verse 5 is effectively saying: God called the period of light “day,” and the period of darkness “night.”

Once you see that, verse 4 becomes easier to follow: “God separated the light from the darkness.” The separation is not merely between two “things,” but between two ordered periods that will soon be identified by name. And if “light” carries that sense in verses 4–5, it is natural to hear verse 3 in the same register: “God said, ‘Let there be a period of light.’” Since what is brought into existence is a period of light, set apart from a period of darkness and named “day,” it seems best to understand day one as marking the emergence of time’s rhythm through the assignment of purpose to the alternating cycles of light and darkness.

This implies that day one isn’t primarily about creating light as a substance but about God instituting the basic framework for the progression of time. The day-night cycle is the most fundamental rhythm governing life on earth. Before Genesis speaks of creatures and their domains, it begins with the rhythm that will govern them all.

Day Two (Genesis 1:6-8)

In the second day of creation, it’s easy to skim over phrases like “God made the expanse,” but what exactly is the “firmament” or “expanse” mentioned in this passage? And why was it so significant?

In the ancient Hebrew context, the word for firmament, “rāqīa”, likely referred to something much different than what we picture when we think of the sky. Ancient cultures in the Near East often thought of the sky as a solid dome or structure, holding back waters above the earth. This concept might sound strange to us, but it made perfect sense to people living in a pre-scientific world. People commonly thought of the sky as solid in some way, and if the Hebrew term is to be taken in its normal contextual sense, it indicates that God created a solid dome to hold up waters above the earth.

Of course, there is no literal dome above the earth. But that’s not really the point. For the original audience, the firmament symbolised something far more important. It was a system for regulating rainfall.

Rain was everything in the ancient world. Too much brought devastating floods. Too little meant failed crops and famine. The firmament represented a regulatory mechanism, a critical part of the weather system on which the balance and order of life depended. While there may be no literal dome, the image captures how the ancient audience experienced and understood their world. On the second day of creation, God arranged the weather system to ensure Earth could sustain life.

Day Three (Genesis 1:9-13)

On the third day, the continuing theme of separation plays a prominent role, which is then manifested in two distinct ways:

1. Separation of land and water: in Genesis 1:9-10, God gathers the waters together to allow dry land to appear. This act of separation creates a distinct boundary between land and water, making it possible for the land to support vegetation and become a home for both humans and animals.
2. Separation within vegetation: God commands the earth to bring forth plants and fruit trees, each reproducing “according to its kind” (Genesis 1:11-12). This distinction ensures the sustainability of plant life and provides a diverse array of food sources for other living beings.

In short, day three is very much related to the provision of food.

In Ancient Egypt, the Nile’s annual flooding deposited fertile silt that enabled crops to grow. This cycle of flooding and renewal was symbolised by the primordial hillock—the image of fertile soil emerging after the waters receded. Egyptian cosmology saw the appearance of dry land and the growth of food as a cosmic re-enactment of the original creation, where earth surfaced from the primordial waters.

The ancient Hebrews likely understood day three in similar terms. The emergence of dry land and vegetation signalled a world becoming habitable. Day three captures the awe of the ancient world concerning the process through which plants grow, produce seeds, and give rise to new generations of the same species.

Summarising Day One to Three

In summary, the theological significance of the first three days of creation in Genesis can be understood as God ordering the essential framework for the progression of time, weather, and the land with its food sources.

Later in Genesis, this ordered world is disrupted by a flood, a catastrophe that reverts a part of the earth to a chaotic, nonfunctional state. As the waters recede, dry land reemerges, and God makes a poignant promise: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (Genesis 8:22). Here again, we find the same three pillars—food, weather, and time—woven into the narrative, but in reverse order.

The Genesis of Functionaries: Examining God’s Work on Days Four to Six

Technically, the first three days form their own distinct act. During these opening “days,” God is setting the stage—creating structures, dividing light from darkness, separating land from sea, and shaping the environments that life will need. Then, starting on day four, the focus shifts. Now God begins filling those empty spaces. The barren stage transforms into a bustling theatre: lights appear in the sky, creatures populate the earth and seas and air, and the world comes alive. The first three days establish order; the last three days inhabit that order.

This symmetry isn’t just decorative. The seven days appear to function as a literary framework, arranging the creation story into thematic pairs rather than a strict chronological sequence. On that reading, the “days” are not meant to be understood as literal 24-hour periods, but as theological categories that highlight different aspects of God’s creative work.

Day Four – Genesis 1:14-19

The account of the fourth day deliberately echoes the first day’s ordering of light and darkness by focusing on the purpose of the “lights” in the firmament. It returns to that original distinction and gives it further structure. In Genesis, these heavenly lights separate day from night, giving light upon the earth, and serving as markers for “signs, seasons, days, and years.”

The sequence of the passage makes this clear. Verse 14 records God’s decree setting out the functions of the lights: they are to serve as signs, to mark sacred times and seasons, and to measure days and years. Verse 15 adds that they are to illuminate the earth. Verse 16 then identifies the greater and lesser lights, together with the stars, and assigns them authority over day and night. Verse 17 states that God set them in the firmament, placing them where their function can be fulfilled. Verse 18 then reiterates their governing role over day and night.

So, the point of day four is about role-assignment. God establishes what the sun, moon, and stars are responsible for—marking the seasons and governing the rhythm of day and night.

Day Five – Genesis 1:20-23

On the fifth day of creation, God creates the living creatures of the waters and skies: fish and birds that will fill their environments and populate their respective domains.

What makes this day particularly interesting is verse 21’s mention of “great creatures of the sea.” The Hebrew word is “tanninim,” which could refer to large marine animals or, in some contexts, even mythological sea monsters. Significantly, the author returns here to the verb “bārā” (to create), a word not used since verse one. This deliberate choice signals that something important is happening.

In the ancient world surrounding Israel, creation myths told a very different story. The cosmic seas were populated with monstrous creatures symbolising chaos and disorder, forces that had to be defeated in battle before the world could be made. These beings represented threats to order itself, enemies that needed to be conquered and restrained by the gods.

But Genesis tells a radically different story. There’s no cosmic warfare here. Instead, these “great creatures of the sea” are simply presented as part of God’s ordered creation. They’re not adversaries to be defeated, they’re creatures that God made.

This is the point the author wants to drive home: all living beings, even the most powerful and fearsome, exist under God’s authority. In other ancient accounts, the world emerges through divine rivalry and violent struggle. Genesis offers a strikingly different vision. Order does not arise from conflict, but from God’s effortless sovereignty.

Day Six – Genesis 1:24-31

On the sixth day, God introduces land creatures, whose primary role is to reproduce and fill the earth. But then the narrative slows, and its attention settles on humanity. Human beings are given the same basic commission to fill the earth, but unlike the rest of creation, they’re given a distinctive role: to subdue and rule over it. They’re also defined by their relationships with one another, designated male and female. Above all, however, humanity is distinguished by the fact they bear the image of God. That is the central idea of the passage. Everything in creation relates to humanity, and humanity serves creation as God’s vice-regents. To bear God’s image means being entrusted with a godlike function in the world He’s placed us in.

In practical terms, God intends for humanity to rule in a manner consistent with His own rule—continuing the work of ordering and subduing the earth so it functions as designed. This isn’t passive caretaking. It’s an active calling to shape, direct, and nurture creation so it flourishes as God intended.

A Sacred Pause: The Seventh Day and Its Implications

At first glance, the seventh day can feel like an add-on. Six days give you sky, land, seas, lights, creatures, and humanity. Day seven gives you a command about Sabbath. It looks smaller, less spectacular. Yet it functions like the climax. The whole process is moving toward this moment.

Because here the text says that God “rests.” That sounds puzzling if we picture rest as recovery. When does an all-powerful Creator need to put his feet up? Did God get tired, lose momentum, or make a mistake? The problem is not the word “rest.” The problem is our modern default picture of what rest is.

In the ancient world, rest was understood less as the absence of work and more as the establishment of order. Chaos had been subdued, and a stable, habitable world had been established. Rest meant stability, the moment when a builder lays down their tools and the house becomes a home. As John Walton put it, “This is more a matter of engagement without obstacles rather than disengagement without responsibilities.”^[ii] In that sense, God’s rest is not exhaustion. It is enthronement. God takes up his residence and begins to reign in a world now fit for life.

This is where the Hebrew notion of “shalom” comes in, a state of peace, wholeness, and flourishing. The pre-creation chaos (“formless and void”) is seen as a discordant disharmony, as something not yet as it should be. As God brings distinction, boundaries, and purpose, the world becomes a place where life can function. Day seven signals that the striving against disorder has been answered by a settled peace. The world is now a cosmos rather than a chaos, and God rests because the conditions for enduring order are in place.

The theological understanding we draw from Genesis 1 is that God is the ultimate author of order. The regularities of nature, the dependability of seasons and tides, the patterns that mathematics can describe, these are not flukes. They are sustained realities that reflect the Creator’s intent. That is why Sabbath matters. It is not mere downtime, it’s a living symbol of shalom—the wholeness God intends for all creation.

Of course, that raises the hard question. If God built the world for order and goodness, why is it so saturated with suffering, illness, and grief? The biblical narrative doesn’t shrug its shoulders. It insists that disorder and brokenness aren’t how things are meant to be; they’re the fallout of humanity’s rebellion, the ripple effects of sin and the work of corrupt spiritual forces. The story doesn’t gloss over these realities, it names them, explains their roots, and holds out hope for their eventual undoing.

So, what does it mean to “keep the Sabbath”? At its heart, it is a practiced act of trust. Israel kept the Sabbath by ceasing from work as a confession that the world was not sustained by their effort, but by God’s. It’s a weekly invitation to release our grip on control and reconnect with God’s design for order and peace.

The Genesis Creation Story: A Concluding Exploration of Its Timeless Significance

To summarise, I hope this has shown that the creation account in Genesis 1 is more layered than a purely straightforward reading suggests. When we consider its ancient context, its themes, and how its first audience likely heard it, the passage can look quite different from some of the simpler interpretations common today. With that in mind, here are our conclusions:

First, Genesis 1 describes the functional origins of the world, not its material beginnings. Reading Genesis 1 this way doesn’t rule out God’s role in material creation; it simply reflects that material origins weren’t the main focus for ancient Hebrews. Even so, there’s little doubt they would have affirmed that God was ultimately responsible for the material world as well.

Second, the seven days of Genesis 1 have no bearing on discussions regarding the age of the earth. This conclusion stems from an analysis and interpretation of the Genesis text within its ancient context. While many young-earth proponents defend their view out of a perceived obligation to uphold the Bible’s authority, the biblical text itself does not demand a young-earth perspective. Consequently, there is little reason to maintain this stance. Believers who are prepared to consider unpopular positions and explore alternative interpretations in an effort to defend the Bible’s reputation may find solace in the fact that Genesis 1 does not conflict with scientific evidence supporting an old earth. This realisation may offer comfort to some.

Third, we must remember who Genesis was written for. It was not given to a modern scientific culture, and it was not intended as a coded deposit of future discoveries. It was written for an ancient audience, within an ancient world, and it speaks accordingly. There is no instance in the Old Testament where God imparts scientific knowledge beyond the understanding of the Israelite audience. And if God consistently communicates using terms and concepts familiar to the Israelites, why should we expect to find modern scientific insights hidden within the text?

Genesis does not need to anticipate modern cosmology, geology, or biology in order to be credible. To demand this is to force the text into a role it was never meant to play. But this does not mean Genesis is merely poetic or theologically suggestive, as though it makes no real claims about the world. Its claims are not scientifically technical, but they are real. God chose to communicate deeper theological truths through the framework his audience already knew, and once we recognise that the text does not provide scientific explanations, Genesis 1 is not in conflict with contemporary scientific thought.

We already understand this principle in ordinary speech. When we say, “It’s raining cats and dogs,” we don’t mean literal animals are falling from the sky, but the phrase instantly conveys the idea of a heavy downpour. Or consider statements like, “The sky is blue” or “The sun sets in the west.” Scientifically speaking, the atmosphere scatters light, and the Earth’s rotation creates the illusion of a setting sun, but that doesn’t make these phrases any less meaningful or true in context. Similarly, when the Bible talks about the world, it might not match up with today’s scientific textbooks, but that’s not the point. Genesis 1 can offer a true theological vision of the world without functioning as a modern scientific explanation.

Fourth, even where we can ease apparent tensions between Genesis 1 and modern science, it is still important to recognise that Genesis is doing something science, by design, does not try to do. Science excels at describing the patterns, processes, and regularities that make the universe intelligible. But science is methodologically restricted to questions it can test, measure, and model, which means it typically addresses “how” far more directly than “why.” Genesis, by contrast, speaks with quiet insistence about purpose: that the material world is not a coincidence, but a meaningful reality.

At the centre of Genesis is a simple claim that God is the ultimate cause of reality, the source and sustainer of all that exists, whatever secondary causes may operate within creation. That is not a retreat from science. If anything, it can deepen the impulse to study the world, because reality is seen as ordered, intelligible, and worth understanding. Science, by its own methods, cannot prove or disprove ultimate causation or purpose, though scientists may rationally infer a creative purpose underlying the universe.

When materialists say that reality is limited to what the material sciences can measure, they are not just making a scientific claim. They are also making a philosophical one. It is a bit like a fish insisting that only water is real and that air is imaginary (even though fish could not breathe if the water were not oxygenated by air). The point is that a method designed to study material causes cannot, by itself, rule out any deeper frame of meaning or purpose.

Genesis, for its part, is not metaphysically neutral. It presents the world as purposeful, focusing on what creation is for rather than spelling out the exact material processes by which God brought it into being. Keeping that teleological focus in view means God’s agency remains central, whatever mechanisms we think operated in the physical world. In Genesis, God’s intention and activity take centre stage, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Walton explains:

“Whatever empirical science has to say about secondary causation, [it] offers only a bottom-layer account and therefore can hardly contradict the Bible’s statements about ultimate causation. Whatever mechanisms can be demonstrated for the material phase, theological convictions insist that they comprise God’s purposeful activity… The text looks to the future (how this cosmos will function for human beings with God at its centre) rather than to the past (how God brought material into being). Purpose entails some level of causation (though it does not specify the level) and affirms sovereign control of the causation process.”^[iii]

On this reading, Genesis 1 implies a mindful presence behind the intelligibility and order of the cosmos. Naturalism typically moves in the opposite direction. It treats the universe as self-contained and ultimately self-explanatory, governed by discoverable laws that need no author beyond the system itself, whether those laws are seen as eternal or somehow self-created. Yet this view still assumes that mathematical elegance and cosmic architecture can emerge without a mind to conceive them. It reinterprets apparent design as good fortune, ultimately leaving us with a cosmos that is, at its core, a magnificent coincidence.

The Cognitive Processes Behind Ancient and Modern Perspectives

Finally, and I think this is worth adding, one helpful way to think about the difference between ancient and modern views of creation is through the lens of left and right hemisphere attention.

The brain is divided into two hemispheres, but it does not operate as two independent “modules”. Even functions that are often associated with one side recruit the other. Language is a good example. It is often linked with the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere helps us understand tone, context, and implication. In the same way, the left hemisphere may handle precise calculation, while the right helps with pattern recognition, comparison, and pattern-level judgment. So it would be far too simplistic to say that one side does one thing, and the other side does something else. Human thought is much more integrated than that.

Even so, the two hemispheres do tend to bring different kinds of attention to the world. Broadly speaking, the left hemisphere is associated with focused, analytical attention. It is good at categorising, abstracting, and breaking things down into parts. The right hemisphere is associated with a wider, more relational kind of attention. It is more attuned to the whole, to context, to meaning, and to the way things fit together. Both modes matter, but depending on the question we’re asking, one may take the lead.

Seen this way, the left-hemisphere style maps neatly onto much of the modern scientific impulse to understand the universe in terms of mechanisms and material causes. That approach is powerful because it breaks complex systems into smaller parts, making it easier to identify regularities.

By contrast, the right-hemisphere style aligns more naturally with many ancient accounts of creation, where the driving questions were about function, order, and meaning. This is a more holistic way of seeing reality. It sees creation not as a pile of disconnected parts, but as an ordered and purposeful whole. That is why ancient people often imagined the cosmos as something like a body, a kingdom, or a temple. In fact, in the ancient Near East, temples were viewed as miniature models of the universe. Genesis flips that idea on its head. The universe itself is the temple. Creation isn’t just about stuff being made; it’s about the world being ordered to work together as a dwelling place for God, and we are central to that narrative. If we want a fuller understanding of our world, we should be careful not to ignore either perspective. A focus on material origins yields real insight into the physical history and structure of the cosmos. But a functional, meaning-oriented reading helps us ask what the world is for. The Genesis narrative makes a bold claim here: we are not orphans of chance. The cosmos is not merely a neutral backdrop churning away like a machine, but as a deliberate work of art by a Creator who meant for us to be here.

^[i] Walton, J.H. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, 16.

^[ii] Walton, J.H. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, 72.

^[iii] Walton, J.H. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, 117-119.