Sermon Tone Analysis

*Title: After Darkness, Light*

*Text: Genesis 1:2-5*

!!!!!! Preached by Pastor Phil Layton at Gold Country Baptist Church on Sunday, May 27, 2007

www.goldcountrybaptist.org

The medieval times or Middle Ages are often called the dark ages for a number of reasons, but spiritually speaking the world was very dark and lifeless and void, but the Sovereign Spirit of God was still at work and began to move across the darkness of the globe once again energizing and regenerating life.

What didn’t previously exist was spoken into existence, God called out elect servants rescued from the dark world system of Catholicism, by the Word of God new hearts were created in a few faithful men so that “after darkness light” from God’s Scripture could be shone and the Reformation went forth and the gospel spread across the earth.

When we were in Germany a few years ago, I was able to visit the monument in the city of Worms where there is a 20 or 30 foot tall statue of Martin Luther right in the middle of the town square surrounded by pre-Reformers such as John Huss, Wyclif, Savonarola, Melancthon, and others.

In Amsterdam there is a painting done by a seventeenth-century Dutch painter titled simply “The Candlestick.”

It depicts all the leading Reformers—including some voices for reform from the Middle Ages [mentioned above] gathered around a table upon which a single, shining candle burns.

The painting graphically portrays the main achievement of the Reformers: the unveiling of the light of the gospel in Europe after a long eclipse and period of spiritual darkness.

/Post Tenebras, Lux/ (“After darkness, light”), the words carved in stone on the Reformation wall in Geneva, could well serve as a title to this painting.[1]

Those words also well serve as a title to this message, as they’re an allusion to God’s work in Genesis 1:2-5, as well as God’s ongoing work through the gospel.

“After Darkness, Light” also were used as a title of a book with essays in honor of R.C. Sproul, which I would recommend for further reading on the great truths and distinctive teachings of the Reformation.

Click here

 

Martin Luther wrote: ‘I recall that at the beginning of my cause Dr. Staupitz ... said to me: It pleases me that the doctrine which you preach ascribes the glory and everything to God alone and nothing to man; for to God (that is clearer than the sun) one cannot ascribe too much glory, goodness, etc.

This word comforted and strengthened me greatly at the time.

And it is true that the doctrine of the gospel takes all glory wisdom, righteousness, etc., from men and ascribes them to the Creator alone, who makes everything out of nothing.’[2]

Sadly, just a couple centuries after the light of the Reformation had burned brightly, Christians in Germany and Europe began to buy into secular experts and critics who on the basis of scientific enlightenment and other movements attacked Genesis and later the miracles of Scripture, and churches began to compromise the Word of God by not interpreting it literally and historically.

They tried to make it more in line with the world and its dark and lifeless thinking and theories.

The result was not atheism, but deism, and eventually naturalism and evolutionism and its latest dogma Darwinism, which now holds so much of the world in darkness.

The European church which began with compromises in how Scriptures like Genesis were interpreted, eventually went down a slippery slope that compromised on other doctrines, questioned inerrancy and infallibility and historicity or literal meaning of passages.

Now by and large, Europe is spiritually lifeless and void and dark and in need of Genesis 1 light.

While many non-Christians and secular scientists critiqued and argued against evolution and continue to, many Christians uncritically embraced evolution and happily jumped on board at the expense of biblical truth.

Christianity in its never-ending quest to keep in step with cultural trends and theories, often rewrites its message to marry ideas and systems that change and are thrown out and discarded by the world.

In church’s efforts to stay relevant, they become /irrelevant/ when they undermine the life-transforming power and authority and inspiration and clarity of Scripture.

Apart from God’s Spirit moving across our waters again, America spiritually will continue to follow the history of Europe on their slippery path of compromise, and we want to make sure at least our church stands firm on the absolute truthfulness of infallible inerrant and inspired Bibles cover to cover, including /in the beginning/.

Martin Luther said of this book, “There is nothing more beautiful than the Book of Genesis, nothing more useful,” and he regarded the opening verses as “certainly the foundation of the whole of Scripture.”

Needless to say, not everyone has approached the opening words of the Bible with such warm delight!

Rather, the early verses of Genesis have become a veritable battleground where those who defend the faith have waged war with those who approach them with calculated skepticism or outright antagonism.

Brief excerpts from /Humanist Manifesto I and II /will suffice to illustrate the point: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created … we begin with humans not God … we can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species … no deity will save us; we must save ourselves.”[3]

As we saw last week, the Bible begins profoundly differently than all else: “In the beginning God”

-          God is the subject, the grand object of all, the center and pursuit and goal of all is His glory

-          God is the Creator and the One every humanist and atheist is accountable to and they cannot ultimate suppress Him and those who try to save themselves apart from God’s grace will suffer eternal wrath from the God they now deny

 

What did God want to convey in Genesis 1:2-5 to the original audience in their original context?

Remember the Israelites are on their way to the Promised Land and Moses received by divine revelation and inspiration the true account of origins and he writes these first 5 books and gives them to the people before they go to the promised land.

The portrayal of God as the creator and sustainer of all life has great bearing on the fact that God was now creating Israel as a new nation among the nations.

It might be helpful to compare the beginning of the Torah with the end of the Torah.

Below are among Moses’ final words to his people

 

Deuteronomy 31:24-30 \\ *24 **It came about, when Moses finished writing the words of this law in a book until they were complete,** \\ 25 **that Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying,** \\ 26 **“Take this book of the law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may remain there as a witness against you.**

\\ 27 **“For I know your rebellion and your stubbornness; behold, while I am still alive with you today, you have been rebellious against the Lord; how much more, then, after my death?**

\\ 28 **“Assemble to me all the elders of your tribes and your officers, that I may speak these words in their hearing and call the heavens and the earth to witness against them.*

/Verse 24 says Moses finished writing the law ~/ Torah, so this is while it is fresh in his mined, and notice that the heavens and earth that he wrote about God creating in Genesis 1:1 are now called to witness against those who do not glorify the God who made them – both special and general revelation indict those who rebel/

* *

*29 **“For I know that after my death you will act corruptly and turn from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you in the latter days, for you will do that which is evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking Him to anger with the work of your hands.”**

\\ 30 **Then Moses spoke in the hearing of all the assembly of Israel the words of this song, until they were complete:** \\ Deuteronomy 32 \\ 1 **“Give ear, O heavens, and let me speak; And let the earth hear the words of my mouth.**

\\ 2 **“Let my teaching drop as the rain, My speech distill as the dew, As the droplets on the fresh grass And as the showers on the herb.**

\\ 3 **“For I proclaim the name of the Lord; Ascribe greatness to our God!*

/ /

/Again in v. 1 the heavens and earth of Genesis 1:1 are appealed to, and he calls all to ascribe greatness to our God.

That’s the most important thing I can do as a leader is to uplift and exalt and direct you to the great God of creation/

/ /

*4 **“The Rock!

His work is perfect, For all His ways are just; A God of faithfulness and without injustice, Righteous and upright is He.** \\ 5 **“They have acted corruptly toward Him, They are not His children, because of their defect; But are a perverse and crooked generation.*

*6 **“Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and unwise people?

Is not He your Father who has bought you?

He has made you and established you.*

\\ \\

/The God of perfect attributes, the One who made you and is so great and has done great things for you, this is how you repay?

/

/ /

*7 **“Remember the days of old, Consider the years of all generations.

Ask your father, and he will inform you, Your elders, and they will tell you.*

/Here he calls them to think back on Genesis and what they have learned there/

\\ *8 **“When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, When He separated the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples According to the number of the sons of Israel.**

\\ 9 **“For the Lord’s portion is His people; Jacob is the allotment of His inheritance.**

\\ 10 **“He found him in a desert land, And in the howling waste of a wilderness; He encircled him, He cared for him, He guarded him as the pupil of His eye.** \\ 11 **“Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, That hovers over its young, He spread His wings and caught them, He carried them on His pinions.**

\\ 12 **“The Lord alone guided him, And there was no foreign god with him.*

\\ \\

This passage alludes to Genesis, that in a similar way God created and called out all things at the beginning of Genesis, He also created and called out a people for Himself.

In this Deuteronomy passage, the word “waste” or “wasteland” in v. 10 is the same Hebrew word /tohu /used in Genesis 1:2 for the earth being void

 

Genesis 1:1 ends with the phrase “the earth” and then v. 2 begins with the same phrase “the earth” – when a word is used back to back this is a figure of speech[4] which focuses attention on the earth rather than the heavens.

The Hebrew also has an unusual word order for emphasis here (subject before verb) to further focus, and the idea could be translated, “As to the earth, it was formless and void.”[5]

The NIV has “formless and empty”

 

The words in the Hebrew are a rhyming wordplay; /tohu /and /bohu/

They are not real common words used like this, but we also have examples in English of rhyming wordplays that we might use to emphasize something: Hodge-podge, helter-skelter, willy-nilly

 

Emptiness is a good rendering, the idea is uninhabitable, lifeless, needing the potter to form and fashion and complete and decorate the primeval planet so that it can sustain life and ultimately man made in his image.

The features of earth as we know it were undifferentiated, unseparated, unorganized, and uninhabited.

It’s been pointed out that ‘Deut 32:10–11 is probably a deliberate echo of Gen 1:2.

Moses’ Song is describing God’s care and provision for his people during their desert sojourn, where apart from God they could not have survived (32:10–14).

/Tôhû wâbôhû/ has the same sense in Genesis 1, characterizing the earth as uninhabitable and inhospitable to human life.

Despite the threatening desert, God protects and matures Israel during its troubled times.

Similarly, although the earth, as it stood, could not support terrestrial life, it was no threat to God, whose “Spirit” exercised dominion over it.

God’s purposes were not hindered by /tôhû/, for “he did not create it [earth] to be /tôhû/ (i.e., desolate) but formed it to be inhabited” (Isa 45:18; cf.

Job 26:7).’[6]

/What about the Gap Theory?/

Some taught that there are billions of years between Genesis 1:1 and verse 2, where there was a world created, a race before Adam, and all the creatures that are deep in the geological fossil record lived at this time.

But then Lucifer fell from heaven, and there was a massive judgment on the earth so that it was formless and void, and then in verse 2 and following God recreates the earth.

This theory was held by very good men 100 years ago, but seems to have died out in the last 40-50 years, and has been refuted by creationists on all sides of the Genesis debate.

In fact, books published on the various views of Genesis don’t even list this view as one of those still defended.

So I’m not going to spend a lot of time dealing with it in this message, but if you’re interested in studying it further you can read the book “Unformed and Unfilled” by Weston Fields, which really dismantles the gap theory from a young earth creationist perspective.

There are some good grammatical arguments against it in the Hebrew, but let me give you just a couple broader arguments:

1.      First it’s not a good idea to build your theology on the white space in-between verses.

Anytime you are reading into the text something not there is a bad idea

2.      Secondly, it’s not good to rewrite your theology based on theories of biased men who through analyzing incomplete evidence with their imperfect minds come up with imperfect conclusions

3.      We don’t know for sure when angels were created, but Job 38 suggests they may have been around on day 3 of creation, if so that’s too late for their theory – but a bigger problem is that land and the Sun are not created till later.

For land, they might argue that there was a flood (although the Bible never hints of that) but sun was on Day Four of creation.

You can’t have life for ages with no Sun.

4.      I believe Peter (2 Peter 3:4-7) and Jesus refute the idea.

Mk 10:6 “from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female” (unless Jesus was mistaken or misleading his hearers, it seems very clear that Adam and Eve were created back at the beginning of creation, the first week, not after billions of years)

 

Douglas Kelly adds:

‘Even more theologically significant is the clear Biblical teaching running throughout the Old and New Testaments (as in Genesis chapter three and Romans chapter five) that death and disintegration of the entire cosmos came through Adam’s sin, for Adam was the covenant head and representative of the whole creation, not Lucifer.

Although Lucifer fell before Adam, his fall did not bring death into the rest of the created order, because Adam, not Lucifer, was the representative figure (or ‘covenant head’) of the whole creation, thus taking it down with him into judgment.’[7]

The second verse of Genesis 1 describes for us the condition of the earth that God created.

It was not chaos or confusion.

The earth’s first form did not include the shapes of continents and mountain chains.

Instead, the earth was “formless and void” (perhaps better translated as “unformed and unfilled”).

Planet Earth was a globe covered with water.