evening and morning
Definition
Evening and morning is the biblical creation formula with which each of the six creation days is closed (“and there was evening and there was morning”; Gen. 1:5,8,13,19,23,31). In the work of George Warnock — and giving its title to his book Evening and Morning (b2) — this sequence is the key to God’s formative order: darkness always precedes light, chaos precedes order, death precedes resurrection, barrenness precedes fruitfulness. For Warnock, evening-and-morning is not merely a chronological notation but a theological principle that structures the entire history of redemption.
Use
George Warnock
Warnock’s core thesis: God always works from evening to morning. This is not accidental but the God-ordained order of creation. Suffering, darkness, and winter are not aberrations but the necessary evening before God’s morning:
“This is how God always works: from evening to morning, from darkness to light, from chaos to order, from deadness to fruitfulness. The evening is not the end but the beginning of the new day. God always began His creative work in the evening.”
(Evening and Morning, Chapter 1; Gen. 1:5)
Warnock connects the evening-and-morning structure to the creation cycles of nature: the seasons, the hydrological cycle, the seedtime-harvest principle all witness to the same divine order:
“Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter shall not cease (Gen. 8:22). God faithfully maintains His own order of fruitfulness through the seasons — and the same pattern holds for the spiritual harvest He has promised.”
(Evening and Morning, Chapter 2)
The north wind is for Warnock the biblical image of God’s formative evening-work: raw, cold, and lethal to tender growth — but necessary for the ripening of fruit:
“The north wind kills the plant but prepares the earth for the gentle south wind. God has also given the north wind its commandment (Ps. 147:16-17). The difficulties in our lives are not outside God’s command but are themselves the work of His hands.”
(Evening and Morning, Chapter 3; cf. Song 4:16)
Warnock sees Christ’s death and resurrection as the supreme expression of the evening-and-morning principle: the cross is the evening; the resurrection is the morning:
“The greatest evening that ever was fell on Golgotha. But on the third day the morning broke — the morning in which death was swallowed up in victory forever. This is the pattern for all of God’s work in and through His children.”
(Evening and Morning, Chapter 6)