When Does the Day Begin?

By Bob Barney

Christ warned us to be aware of false religion, customs and laws. These warnings have basically fallen on deaf ears. We must all know and pay attention to the most important “sign” of Jesus coming again; it is the spread of false religion and religious practices that are contrary to God. Over the years, God’s Law, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, have been replaced by man’s law. Our theologians call it being “saved by grace” when truly nothing of the sort is biblically sound or true of being saved in this manner.

Christmas, Easter, and Sunday worship actually pre-date the earthly ministry of Jesus! Yes, you read that correctly, these holidays have nothing to do with Christ and were being followed long before GOD became a man and walked among us. Even in the garden of Eden, the very first religious lie promulgated was the “immortal soul” doctrine. To this day, we believe the devil and that “we shall not die but be like God” and live forever as some spirit in heaven or hell. That is Satan’s lie and almost every false religion has adopted it.

In Jesus’ time, the Jewish nation, after years of captivity, began to adopt Babylonian ways. They took on the Babylonian calendar and “lost” God’s true perfect one, and at the same time began the truly pagan observance of “evening days.”  This simply means that, like the Babylonians, they began to start their day at sunset rather than sunrise. Like everything else, the theologians of the day twisted a few scriptures which may imply evening days and ignored hundreds of scriptures that proved that God’s day starts in the morning. Most Sabbath keeping churches to this day follow this pagan start of the day and continue the practice of those lawless religious leaders that killed Christ! The same people He declared at his arrest were those who worshipped the DARKNESS, and darkness is when evil reigns! Yes, the nighttime is darkness and God IS NEVER in darkness! We read in Revelation that when Christ returns to Jerusalem, that where He is will always be in light! There will be no nighttime in the Holy City! Yes, it’s in the same Bible that we all read. Revelation 21:23 “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb [is] the light thereof.”

In the very first chapter of the Bible, we read “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” 

When did this happen, in the evening time? Is there light at night? Read on…“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. “ See? He called the light DAY! It is clear, when GOD said “Let there be light” it became day! It was dawn!

Let’s read on! “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Do you get that? After daytime of about twelve hours, evening time came, still part of day one, then came the next day IN THE MORNING!

Let’s examine the first week:

Darkness over the earth……….. This may have been millions of years. There was an earth BEFORE our present-day earth that was ruled by Lucifer (under God) and then destroyed by God when Lucifer became Satan. Look at any good Bible commentary and you will see that in Gen 1;2 “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep.”  That the word “was” (formless and void) can be translated BECAME! This is important. There is a big difference between was and became! Why does the bible commentators put this in? The reason is that they understand the significance of Jeremiah 45:18. Notice Isaiah 45:18. “Thus saith the Eternal that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth and made it, He hath established it, He created it not in vain.” “In vain” is an incorrect translation. In your Bible, if you have the marginal references, you will find in the margin the proper translation “waste”. The original Hebrew word there is TOHU. This Hebrew word is the identical word used in Gen. 1:2, meaning confusion, or emptiness. or waste – a result of disorder, a result of violation of law. In Isaiah 45:18 we have the plain statement that God created the earth not “toho,” that is, not in confusion, not in disorder. But in Genesis 1:2, the earth was, or the earth BECAME – as it ought to be translated – chaotic and in confusion.

The next issue. How long did the rain fall during Noah’s flood?
How long did Moses stay on Mt Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments?

How long was Jonah in the belly of the fish, or Jesus in the tomb?

Answers:
40 days and nights
40 days and nights
3 days and 3 nights, and 3 days and 3 nights.

Question for you Sabbath Keeping Churches…

So, the question is why wasn’t this time above rendered as 40 nights and days or 3 nights and days? Jesus was truly in the ground for 3 nights and days, but he used the term DAY and NIGHT! Think about that….

In Leviticus 22:29-30: “When you sacrifice a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Lord … it shall be eaten on the same day, you shall leave none of it until morning.” The insistence of the eating of the sacrifice “on the same day” before the arrival of the “morning,” implies that the next morning marked the beginning of the next day. This suggests that the day began in the morning, because, as Roland de Vaux points out, “had the day begun in the evening the wording would have ordered the meat to be eaten before the evening.”

The Law says: “But if the sacrifice of his offering is a votive offering or a freewill offering it shall be eaten on the day he offers sacrifice, and on the morrow what remains of it shall be eaten” (Lev 7:16). In this case the flesh of the sacrifice could be eaten both on the day of the sacrifice and “on the morrow.” By virtue of the parallelism with the preceding law, the “morrow” must begin in the morning.

Quote below from: THE RECKONING OF THE DAY IN BIBLE TIMES

Samuele Bacchiocchi, Ph. D., Andrews University

“A second type of evidence supporting the sunrise reckoning seems implied also in the Passover legislation of Exodus 12. The law prescribes that the Paschal lamb must be slaughtered on the “fourteenth day of this month … in the evening” (v. 6) and must be eaten “that night” (v. 8) with “unleavened bread and bitter herbs” (v. 8), leaving none of it “until the morning” (v. 10). Later in the same chapter the night during which the Passover lamb was eaten with unleavened bread is explicitly designated as “the fourteenth day of the month” (v. 18).

“What this means is that in Exodus 12 both the slaying of the Passover lamb, which took place “between the two evenings” (Ex 12:6— that is to say, as Josephus explains, between three and five o’clock in the afternoon),18 and the eating of the lamb with unleavened bread, which took place on the following night, are placed on the same fourteenth day of the month.

“This time reference cannot be harmonized with the sunset reckoning, according to which the night following the sacrifice of the Passover was not the 14th but the 15th day of Nisan. In fact, in several passages which reflect the sunset reckoning, the beginning of the feast of unleavened bread is explicitly placed “on the fifteenth day” (Lev 23:5; Num 28:16).

“According to the sunrise reckoning, however, both the slaying of the lamb and the eating of it with unleavened bread would take place on the 14th day, because the night following the slaying of the lamb would still be the 14th day until sunrise. This method, then, seems to be implied in Exodus 12, because, speaking of “the fourteenth day of the month” it explicitly says: “And you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt” (v.17; cf. vv. 18, 42, 51).

“Jacob Z. Lauterbach rightly observes that “if they came out at night, that is the night following the fourteenth day, and it is said on the very same day, that is on the fourteenth day, they were brought out, it clearly indicates that the night following the fourteenth day is still part of that day.”19

“The foregoing considerations suggest that in Exodus 12 the sunrise reckoning is used, since the events of the night following the slaying of the Passover Lamb, namely, the eating of the lamb with unleavened bread and the departure from Egypt, are both placed on the same 14th day. Elsewhere these events are explicitly placed “on the fifteenth day of the first month” (Num 33:3; cf. 28:17; Lev 23:5), thus indicating the use of the sunset reckoning.

“The sunrise reckoning of the Passover found in Exodus 12 seems reflected also in Mark 14:12 (cf. Matt 26:16) where the slaying of the Passover lamb and the feast of Unleavened Bread are both placed on the same day: “On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb” (v. 12). This statement suggests a sunrise reckoning, according to which, as Jack Finegan explains, “the day when the Passover lamb was slain and the day when the unleavened bread was eaten were indeed the same day, as Mark 14:12 states.”20”

The Bible says the day starts in the morning!

Each day, at sunrise, the world experiences the same beginning as it did on day six of creation. Dawn breaks, the birds sing and the day progresses until evening, when most work for the day is accomplished. Then evening comes, and nighttime, followed at sunrise by a new day. Isn’t that how your biological clock works? Does your body recognize midnight as a new day, or 6 PM? NO! You wake up refreshed for a new day in the morning!

The day symbolizes YOUR LIFE!

At sunrise, the day begins, which symbolizes your birth. As morning progresses, the earth warms and gets ready for the sun to work its way across the sky. We say, “the day is young.” In the morning, we look at the day ahead as a long time, just as we look at our life when we are teenagers or younger. As we age, the fear of death begins to creep in, as in the afternoon, the hint of nighttime fills the air. The birds start gathering for night, the day is now at its warmest and things begin to slow down, just as our bodies do. The twilight of our lives, represent the twilight of the day. At sunset, the day is old, and so are we in our mortal physical life. Evening comes and the day dies… In our evening we die too.  We sleep that night until DAWN, just as when we die, we sleep in our graves until the LIGHT OF GOD awakes us from our death. For us a new day- our first day of immortal life! 

Each 24-hour day, God reenacts the same symbolic signs of our entire life to remind us not to fear the BIG SLEEP but to understand that when we awake, our immortal new life begins!

As John says, “Come Jesus…”