Sermon Tone Analysis
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Overview
This year we’re going to do something I’ve never really done before.
We’re going to spend the whole year studying just one single book of the Bible.
This whole year, we’ll be diving deep into the book of Genesis.
I’ve decided to do this for two reasons, really.
Firstly, because I’ve done a lot of praying, and I feel that this is where the Holy Spirit is leading me.
If that’s not enough, however, I also feel that it is of the utmost importance for us to understand Genesis if we’re going to understand anything else in the Bible.
Genesis is the beginning, it is the overture to the rest of scripture.
Much like a musical or a play, if you miss out on the overture you won’t understand the major themes and ideas when they come back later.
It just so happens that Genesis comes back in almost every chapter of the Bible!
We have to get Genesis right if we want to read scripture in all of its fullness.
This might be challenging for us, however.
I think many Christians feel that they already know Genesis well.
It’s like we’re going through familiar territory: The Creation, The Fall, Noah’s ark, Abraham, Joseph, these are familiar characters in familiar settings.
I would like to challenge you, however, to come to these characters and these stories with fresh eyes.
Let them speak to you anew all over again.
I think if we do that, we’ll come to realize how little we understood Genesis all along.
And by coming to Genesis as foreigners, unfamiliar with these people and places, we’ll be able to see things that we never saw before.
Have you ever took someone new to the area on a tour around town?
Or even just given someone a tour of your house?
I find that when I do that, they tend to point out thinks I had alway just overlooked.
When I was in college, I loved to hang out with the foreign students.
I loved asking them questions about where they were from, and they loved having someone who could help them understand the strange land that they were in as well.
One friend of mine pointed out how clean Americans keep their streets.
In Mexico, he said, people just throw trash wherever.
A friend from China commented on how clean the air was in America.
That same friend also told me people were a lot less involved in each other’s lives here.
In China, he told me, people you grow up with and go to high school with remain in your inner circle for the rest of your life.
These friends of mine, foreigners that they were, gave me a whole new outlook on the place I thought I was so familiar with.
And they often made me realize I didn’t know as much about the place as I thought I did!
So I hope, this year, you’ll become a foreigner with me.
That you’ll look with fresh perspectives on the stories you grew up with.
I think that if you do that, you’ll be surprised by the rich depths of these stories you’d never noticed before.
Foreigners, people who are unfamiliar to the area, are always more attentive to details.
In fact, the things they point out have often changed my perspective entirely of the places I thought I was so familiar with.
Day One (v.
1:1-5)
This very first chapter of Genesis is somewhat unique.
There is an overarching pattern to the Book of Genesis.
It is a series of stories and genealogies, yet this passage stands outside of that pattern.
It is like an opening song, or overture, to the rest of the book.
It is unique, it is poetic, and it has more to tell us than I think many have realized.
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”
This simple line, the very first verse of the Bible, already needs some fresh perspective.
We typically think of Genesis as a creatio ex nihilo, that is, a creation from nothing.
That’s not actually what we have here, however.
In the beginning, God creates out of tohu wabohu, which is translated here as “a formless void”.
It’s probably more accurate to say it was a “barren desert”.
And more precisely, it’s a “barren oceanic desert.”
A vast empty sea, over which the Spirit of God is hovering.
By “empty” or “barren” here, the author doesn’t mean “non-existent”.
The Hebrew “tohu” really means “unproductive”.
Nothing can grow there, it is not suitable for life.
Now, don’t take this to mean that God didn’t also create water, or that the matter the universe is made out of is eternal just like God.
There are other parts of scripture that affirm the idea of creatio ex nihilo, and that tell us that God created even the waters and atoms the universe is made of.
But that’s not at all what this passage is concerned with.
No, in this part of the story, God is hovering over the chaotic oceanic desert, ready to bring forth life.
This is actually not an uncommon theme in Ancient Near Eastern Creation Myths.
Other cultures, like Egypt or Babylon, also thought that the world began as a great ocean.
You see, in the ANE, water often represented chaos.
For ancient people, the oceans and seas were a terrifying place.
There was no knowing when a storm may rise up, capsizing ships, or what huge monstrous creatures lurked beneath the depths of the waters.
And so ANE creation myths often began with one or more Gods presiding over the chaotic waters, fighting off chaos monsters, and bringing about the creation of the world.
In ancient Babylon, one such creation myth is the Enuma Elish.
It tells us the story of the god Marduk fighting off the goddess of the chaotic oceans, Tiamat.
In the story, Marduk battles Tiamat over the ocean.
Eventually, he overcomes the goddess by sending his wind down her throat, so that she could not close her mouth.
Then, he grabbed each jaw and ripped her in two, throwing one half of her corpse upward to create the sky, and one half downward to create the earth.
An ancient reader might make some connections, here then.
This may have been a moment of tension.
What chaotic monsters would rise up to challenge this God?
But no such thing happens!
No monster rises from the deep, there is no one present to challenge this God.
He doesn’t have to defeat dragons and monsters to bring about order and life to the desert.
No, this God simply says, “Let there be light, and there was light.”
This God creates by act of speech alone.
This very first verse sets up a kind of loose pattern for the rest of Chapter 1.
God Speaks, “Let there be...”
His Speech comes to Pass, “And it was so.”
God evaluates, “And it was good”
God Names, “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.”
Conclusion, “There was evening and there was morning, the first day.”
This creation by speech alone shows us that God is utterly unique, there is no challenger to this God.
He is utterly and completely in control.
He speaks, and his will is carried out.
His evaluation, “it was good”, lets us know that the creation is precisely as God intended.
The word here, “good”, tob, means “beautiful”.
It’s not a moral kind of good.
It’s aesthetically pleasing, everything is working the way God intended, and it is beautiful.
That God names these things he has created, is also important.
In the ANE, naming was about identity, role, and function.
The point being made in this creation story, then, isn’t just that God “made” something materially.
It is that he gave it order, meaning, a function, and a role to play in the larger scheme of things.
This is an aspect of creation we typically don’t think about in modern interpretations of Genesis.
Think about someone who makes a chair.
The material creation is important, for sure.
To have a chair, you’ve got to have wood or metal arranged in a particular atomic structure.
But think about the creation of the very first wooden object with four legs and a platform.
What if the person who constructed this object never gave it a name or a purpose.
What if he just put the wood together this way and said “That’s all folks!”.
No one would know to sit on this object, the thing this person constructed would be a useless waste of space.
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