I am struggling to understand how the days are counted. God created light out of the darkness, that would be day. Then He said there was evening and morning one day. Just an evening and a morning is not a day, it is half a day. I can not understand how this was figured out. Your help would be most appreciated.
Genesis 1:5 says, God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning–the first day.
The light portion of the day is called day and the dark portion of the day is called night. The evening begins the dark portion and the morning begins the light portion. So the dark portion precedes the light portion. One dark portion and one light portion equals one day.
There’s a great lesson being taught here. In the evening as darkness begins to fall we can sometimes experience some confusion, when the approaching darkness can cause our eyes to play tricks on us. In the morning objects are more easily distinguished due to the clarity of vision that accompanies dawn. We’ve all experienced this and even have idioms in our language that refer to it.
According to the ancient Hebrew sages, by placing the evening before the morning God was saying that the over arching effect of the creation was to bring clarity out of confusion, or order out of chaos. This is an astonishing discovery, since nature’s way is the exact opposite. Order falls into chaos. That means our world cannot be the product of evolution because left alone things don’t evolve, they devolve. There are examples all over the place. If you don’t maintain your lawn it will eventually become a bed of weeds. Put a group of different pure bred dogs together and eventually you’ll have a pack of mongrels. Fail to maintain your car and it will eventually stop running. It’s the natural order. There had to be a Creator with enough power to reverse the natural order to make our world. It couldn’t have happened by itself.