This is an edited version of a blog I had written last autumn before I began blogging here at Homeschoolblogger.  I happened upon it recently as I was looking through my digital archives.

It was the caffeine in the Pepsi.  And maybe the Holy Spirit, too.  But last night I couldn't sleep.  Or, if I did sleep, then I dreamed about not sleeping.

Finally, at 4:45 a.m., I gave up and got up.

This has been a very long day.

I can't help but think of Thursday's astronomy lesson: Why did God create the lights in the expanse?  To be for days and years; to be for measuring time. 

from Genesis 1:

14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.

The sun measures the day, the moon measures the month, and the constellations measure the years.

This is easily understood from Scripture, yet many Christian leaders confuse the measurement of the day with the definition of the day.  They let themselves become distracted by modern philosophy's aging effect on historical science, and they define a different kind of day to exist before the sun was created, thereby calling into question the very nature of the rest of the days, even those following the sun's creation.

However, they miss an important and carefully constructed lexical distinction earlier in the text:  God had already created and communicated the two distinct definitions of the word "day" on Day 1, three full days before the sun was even created.

Thus we see how the cyclical appearance of the sun measures the day, but it does not and cannot define what a day is. 

The first defininition of day communicates the period of brightness.  The second refers to one cycle of a dark-to-light pattern.

from Genesis 1:

5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.  

The progression of dark to light merits closer consideration.  What is required for this phenomenon?  A fixed light source being observed from a fixed position on a rotating mass.

In other words, there was light, and the earth was rotating.

That's it.  And it doesn't take a highly trained scientist or a theologian to understand this; just a straightforward and honest reading of the text with careful consideration to its content.

The only definable difference between today's day and the first three days of Creation Week is the source of the light, and it simply isn't textually justified to leave those days open-ended and non-literal simply because the sun wasn't yet there to measure it.

Well, now the pale sky has brightened, and just for literary sake, I'd like to add a little something of my own to the definition of a day:  a cycle of wakefulness and sleep.

And I wonder how I'm going to stumble through the rest of this very long day.

However, whenever sleep does finally come, I'll at least have the amusement of knowing that this "day" for me will have been longer than any of the days of Creation, no matter what others may think!

from 2 Timothy 4:

1  I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: 2 Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. 3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; 4 and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. 5 But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

NASA makes no bones about it: the number one reason for studying Mars is to find life.  Any evidence that water exists or once existed beyond the comfort of the earth's atmosphere serves only to encourage the notion that life on earth is non-unique.

Those of us with a biblical perspective understand that life does not arise from water or any other chemical.  And we believe that God's affections are centered and bookended on the life which He so brilliantly created and richly provided for here on Earth.

So what are we to think of the mounting evidence for the existence of water on Mars, the moon, and on one of Saturn's moons, to name some examples?

Dr. Russell Humphreys' hypothesis on the creation of the planets' magnetic fields may offer something for us to think about.

He explains that the spinning of the nuclei in water atoms generates a magnetic field, albeit a very small one, but he reminds us from Scripture that the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters of the deep.  If God chose to line up all the atoms in this raw material so that their nuclei were spinning in the same direction, the cummulative magnetic field would be powerful.  Thermal collisions would cause them to immediately disorient, but the laws of electricity would have set an electrical current going within the core, and that current is what sustains the magnetic field.

In 1984 Dr. Humphreys extended his theory to the other planets in the solar system, explaining the known field strength on the planets already measured, and predicting the field strength for Uranus and Neptune.  In 1986 Voyager II returned a measurement well within his prediction, in contrast to the predictions put forth by the big-bang scientists of our day.  Voyager II's pass by Neptune in 1989 also returned a measurement that fit right in the middle of his predicted range.

This is, in my opinion, a very impressive affirmation that Dr. Humphreys is on the right track.

So, if he's right, and all the planetary bodies were created out of the "waters which were above the firmament," then it should come as no surprise to use that we would find evidence of water and subterranean ice on other planets.  In fact, we can take delight in the discoveries that are taking place.

We just need to train ourselves to sort out the data from the unbiblical interpretation of the data.

from Psalm 119:

 97 Oh, how I love Your law!
         It is my meditation all the day.
 98 You, through Your commandments, make me wiser than my enemies;
         For they are ever with me.
 99 I have more understanding than all my teachers,
         For Your testimonies are my meditation.
 100 I understand more than the ancients,
         Because I keep Your precepts.
 

Many of my Christian friends are loathe to reject the past two centuries of scientific thought in favor of a straightforward reading of Genesis chapters 1 through 11.

To illustrate the error in this logic, here's food for thought:

Under the Ptolemaic system, astronomers incorrectly believed that the stars and planets revolved around the earth.  They held this belief for over a millenium until Copernicus and Galileo proved it false.

Praise be to God that highly qualified scientists are standing against the storm and are working to turn the tide before many more centuries of intellectual and spiritual darkness pass.

from Job 40:

 ² “Who is this who darkens counsel
      By words without knowledge?

 ³ Now prepare yourself like a man;
      I will question you, and you shall answer Me.

 ⁴ “ Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
      Tell Me, if you have understanding.

 ⁵ Who determined its measurements?
      Surely you know!
      Or who stretched the line upon it?

 ⁶ To what were its foundations fastened?
      Or who laid its cornerstone,

 ⁷ When the morning stars sang together,
      And all the sons of God shouted for joy?

 ⁸ “Or who shut in the sea with doors,
      When it burst forth and issued from the womb;

 ⁹ When I made the clouds its garment,
      And thick darkness its swaddling band;

 ¹⁰ When I fixed My limit for it,
      And set bars and doors;

 ¹¹ When I said,
      ‘This far you may come, but no farther,
      And here your proud waves must stop!’