One of the most famous verses of the Bible is at the very start of Genesis: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.” Then God separates the light from the darkness, calls them day and night, and that’s the end of the first day.
Interestingly, it’s not until the fourth day in the Judeo-Christian Creation story that God makes the sun and the moon. That led me to wonder what the light source was before that — and to the theologians’ answer that the initial light came from God’s own luminous self.
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I’m no biblical scholar, nor am I a literalist, but two whole days of making light in the first week of Creation suggests to me that the writers of Genesis believed God loves a bright, sunny day as much as the rest of us.
The sun has played a role for millennia in the human imagination and how we relate to the divine. It is the grand metaphor across religious traditions.
In the Bible, the sun makes many appearances as a marker of time and direction, functions that are so elemental to the human experience that we can barely fathom how they shape us.
Deuteronomy, that reprimanding rule book, warns against worshipping the sun — or the moon or the stars — since God created them and not the other way around.
The biblical writers often turn to the sun when they want to ratchet up the spectacle. For example, Jesus’ face in the moment of transfiguration is described as shining like the sun, his full divinity on brilliant display for the disciples. Later, as Jesus takes his last breaths on the cross, “darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining.”
In their most dramatic writing, the Bible’s authors go even further, halting the sun in its tracks, scorching the sinners with its flames or snuffing it out altogether.
Revelation, the apocalyptic last book of the Bible, contains an interesting twist in its final chapter: “And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light.” Intriguingly, that takes us full circle back to Day 1 of Creation.
More on Broadview:
- Making sense of solar eclipses through ancient superstitions
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- What’s the secret to a more sustainable future?
Today, we are learning more than ever before about our 4.6 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star. As David Wilson beautifully states in this month’s cover story, it’s the sun alone “whose embrace holds our solar system together and whose radiance nurtures everything that lives.”
Future generations will continue to make new scientific discoveries about the sun. Future poets will continue to draw on its power as a metaphor. What’s timeless is the sense of awe that fills us at sunrise and sunset, our gratitude for its warmth on our skin, and the way it sets the rhythms of our days and the seasons of our years. And I think we can all agree that it is good.
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This article first appeared in Broadview’s September/October 2025 issue with the title “The Good Sun.”
Jocelyn Bell is the editor and publisher of Broadview.
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