We seem to have one of two basic approaches to Genesis 1 in the church (although this itself is part of the whole of 1-3). Either it is said to convey information by telling us something that didn't happen. Or it is understood to be telling us what happened, but only as a mechanical curiosity.
The latter party tell us that 'days mean days', God spoke everything into existence and it was very good. And that's it. The former tell us that days aren't days, but some framework construction...but not why.
Tim Challies' part 7 of his series Basic Christianity is a case in point for the second group. Reading it prompted me to the following.
Once we know what happened, we also learn what is and how it is, who we are and of our relation to God, and who God is.
There is a theological richness in Genesis 1 that seems to be set aside by both approaches. The former, because if it didn't happen, it can't teach us anything Really (that is, in or about the real world where we live). The latter because the story ends with factual assent, just a string of facts.
In the whole sweep of scripture the creation is essential. It provides to us the identity of God: creator. This identity is God's 'credential' for our worship of him. This is God's 'worth' to us.
As God's first act in history it places the creation events in the continuity of our history. It shows an underlying continuous reality (ontologically unified) of God's word/action, the world we are in and the 'life-world' we live. It does this by God creating with decisive effect in the days that we live in. He enters into our event-space. He starts with the basic physical constituents of our STEM (space-time-event-material) world, organises them into a living space and places man in it in his image to reflect his glory in the creation through real knowledge of it and continuing his loving care of it all in communion with the creator.
So, its very, very important and fundamental to our relationship with God in all its complex flow: 'very good' to fall (Genesis 3:8 is the signal result: man hiding from the creator who is to be worshiped), then redemption, resurrection and new creation. Worship characterizes our relationship with God, and worship is what we are made for. Being in his image (and in communion with him) is how we do it (Romans 12:1 cf 1:25).
God makes the first move in relationship, of course. Not only in creating us and the domain of that relationship, but in the way he creates.
He enters into our time-space world and works within its constraints; within the same constraints we work within. And he works the same way we do. Not by 'chance and destiny' (Isaiah 65:11) but by word and wisdom (Logos, expanded in Proverbs 3:19, 20). God shows himself in our world: active with decisive effect, available, proximate to us and our domain, sharing his being with us in the domain he creates for that very purpose. This is utterly unlike the pagan fantasies of distant gods to whom man is a slave and whose origin, status and place is lost in the mists of mythic imprecision. God is here, he speaks and shows us the nature of the creation he has made for us. Hebrews 11:3 reinforces this (and eliminates materialist speculations). There is in this an intimate commutative relationship that is beyond astonishing in its implications.
God 'endorses' his creation by working directly to effect and within its constraints honouring us in that these are the constraints God put around us as he made the place where he would come to us in fellowship.
He shows that even using our constraints that he is Lord of creation and what he says happens, effortlessly.
God shows in his creative activity being done in the very terms of our experience of the creation (creating ontological and causal continuity between his Logos and our episteme) that our experience of our 'life-world' is real experience of a real place where real fellowship with God occurs.
I've touched on the next thing Genesis 1 teaches. Logos is prior to 'techne' and produces 'episteme'. Materialism has it the other way: techne (the self-crafting of material) produces episteme (knowledge) that Logos is merely a response to. Yet we do not and cannot live that way because that's not how it really is.
Lastly, we are taught what the Real is. God in direct creation by the effect of his word shows us a rational causality, shows us the categories of reality and shows us there is nothing hidden that's more real outside God's bringing together heaven and earth (that is his domain - heaven, over lapping and interpenetrating ours - earth) in the creation.
He creates the world in the terms of the world that he creates: It will be full of life. He creates the life. To figure out what the life is we don't need to drift off to a Platonic 'form' or Aristotelian 'perfection'. The perfection is the relationship with the God who is.
This world is concretely real, and Genesis 1 demonstrates its concrete reality.
The 'days' are vitally important in God's action: they are as it were, the signature of his action. To hold otherwise is like saying to the hand-builder of a car that he really only drew a sketch and some other unknown process built it. An insult. They are also important as the secure God's action in our Space Time Event Material world This is not the some other 'world' of the pagans, where people are enslaved to the whims of mini gods (and often in a world that is at some level taken as given) a world shrouded in occulting vagueness and dislocation from the real world.
OTOH, if nothing in Genesis 1 happened. Then it teaches us nothing about the world, ourselves or God and God is pushed away to make room for materialism, a project that started in Genesis 3:8 and just like the pagan stories, the cosmos 'just is'. No author, no meaning and of no consequence of any significance to us.
