No confusion here. I am agreeing with you that in the so-called 'literal' interpretation, there were no sun, moon and stars before Day Four. So that, to be consistently 'literal' with this verse, there was no marking of "days" before Day Four.
The sun, moon, and stars are not needed to mark the days... only a fixed light source and the rotation of the earth.
For every interpretation, it is a matter of 'pcik and choose' what you call literal and what you don't.
As is all literature. Even the most technical, literal text contains non-literal components. A proper exegesis depends on hermeneutically interpreting the text based on context.
I have simply dealt with the text in context. You make Day One the beginning of creation, which the text clearly does not. You are thus taking the liberal assupmtion that verse one is a conditional clause. It is not. See standard Bible commentaries like NICOT and BSC.
I disagree. A straight forward reading of the text doesn't reveal any of the information you have read into the text. If you simply take it as written, then it is clear that you have come to the wrong conclusion. It seems to me you are trying to impose a particular mind set upon the text that is not found within the text.
Jesus interprets the text plainly to include verse 1. Note that each subsequent verse in Genesis 1 starting with verse 2 and onward begins with the Hebrew character YOM. The yom means "and". It signals inclusion with the previous statement. So in the sentence, "I went to the store, and the gym, and the park" we know that store, gym, and park all relate to the action "I went." Similarly, all of the verses of Genesis 1 relate back to verse 1 "In the beginning, God created" because of the AND (yom) that begins each verse.
Jesus correctly used this interpretation in Mark 10:6
Mar 10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
He joins "In the beginning God created" (verse 1) with "male and female created He them." (verse 27) as if they are one contiguous statement. If Jesus interpreted the scripture this way, so should we.
My guess is you are a theistic evolutionist, gap theorist, or some kind of ruin/reconstructionist. It is likely your desire to see the scripture be declared correct, but you are doing so by inflicting man's ideas of millions or billions of years upon the text. You hope to "jive" the so-called science (which it is not) of origins with the Bible. You can't insert millions of years into the genealogies, so you must insert it between the creation of the earth and the creation of light (between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2).
But there is a big problem. Once you accept man's faulty assumption of ions of time, and try to impose that idea upon the scripture, you have a lot of fancy foot-work to do. Once you open the door to ions of time, you are essentially proclaiming you accept the geological and biological evidences that have produced the long ages. You are now on the slippery slope to having to account for them as well in your theology. Invariably, you will have to accept that death and decay happened prior to the creation of Adam and in so doing you have to negate the relevancy of Christ's death and the gospel. It is a slippery slope indeed. If the rocks are ions of time old, and those rocks contain fossils, then those fossils must be ions of time old. Since there is no where in the Biblical genealogies to fit ions of time, that means that the death of these fossilized animals had to come prior to the creation of Adam. That means death isn't a result of Adam's sin, but was a permanent part of creation.
Rom 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
If you have death before sin, then it means death was in the earth when God proclaimed everything "very good." (1 Cor 15:26 calls death an "enemy" of God) If you have death before sin, then death wouldn't be a punishment for sin, it would be part of the original design. If the eternal life promised in the Bible is merely spiritual, then Jesus would not have needed to die physically, nor be resurrected physically. Do you see how the assumption of ions of time ultimately undermines the gospel of Jesus Christ?
If you have no prior commitment to ions of time (no extra-Biblical reason), then a straight-forward reading of the Biblical text gives you no reason or cause to insert ions of time.
