Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Introduction

The place we need to start to think correctly, to think grammatically, about is to talk about clauses—and no, I hope you’re not having flashbacks already about going back to English class.

This is not going to be complicated; it’s something very comprehensible.

As we are going to find, it’s something very crucial to being able to read the way a Hebrew writer wrote it and the way his readers would have read it and understood it.

What Is a Clause?

What is a clause?

A clause is a group of related words containing a subject and a verb.

A clause may or may not express a complete thought; we’re going to see the difference in a moment.

The verb may be expressed or just sort of understood.

This is, again, something very common with English.

You can hear English statements and sort of insert a verb if you know it belongs there, because you are a native speaker.

So a clause, again, is where we start.

Independent Clause

There are two types of clauses.

There are independent clauses, and that is a group of words that contains a subject and a verb and in this case expresses a complete thought.

For example, if I say,

“Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam,”

that statement has a subject and a verb—“Jim studied”—and the rest of it sort of closes the thought.

We don’t need any other information to understand that statement.

“Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam.”

There’s nothing that is essential to comprehending “What do we mean?”

Dependent Clause

The second kind of clause is a dependent clause.

A dependent clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a verb but does not express a complete thought.

Let’s take our independent clause and add something to it.

If I add the word

“when”—”When Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam”

—we sort of sense that it’s leading to something.

It’s not something that stands alone; it’s something that contributes to another thought.

That is an example of a dependent clause.

Summary

We have two clauses that we have talked about: independent (“Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam”)—the thought is complete; and we have “When Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam,” and that feels like it’s leading to something else.

That is incomplete, and that’s a dependent clause.[1]

Combining Clause Types

Introduction

We’ve talked about independent clauses and dependent clauses.

Again, independent clauses express a complete idea; dependent clauses do not.

These sorts of clauses get combined in whole sentences or groups of sentences, and the grammar helps us understand how to read something, or, when we hear it, how to process it.

This is what’s going to happen in Genesis.

The Dependent Clause

But I want to show you the example, how it works in English.

Let’s go back to our dependent clause, “When Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam.”

Again, that’s waiting for something, or it needs something to make the thought complete.

Adding an Independent Clause to the End

If we add an independent clause to that, here’s what we would get:

“When Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam, he was able to concentrate.”

Now the thought is complete.

What we’ve done is, we’ve taken a dependent clause and we’ve added another clause to it, an independent one, to make a whole, complete idea out of the two.

“When Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam, he was able to concentrate.”

Now the thought is complete.

What we’ve done is, we’ve taken a dependent clause and we’ve added another clause to it, an independent one, to make a whole, complete idea out of the two.

Adding an Independent Clause to the Beginning

We could also add something to the front:

“His brothers stayed away when Jim studied in his room for his chemistry exam.”

Again, it gives us an added circumstance that completes the idea.

You can either add something to the back or you can add something to the front, but the issue is, a dependent clause is often combined with an independent clause to make a full, complete idea.

Discerning the Clauses in Genesis

This is what’s going to happen in Genesis.

We need to be able to discern what are the independent clauses and what are the dependent clauses, because the independent clauses are the ones that are going to drive the main idea.

If we can isolate the dependent clauses, then we’ll sort of know what modifies an independent clause, or what is sort of secondary.

What sort of needs supplementation, as we read through Genesis?

What this is going to do when we look at Genesis is, it’s going to dictate to us whether we can read as a linear sequence of events or not.[2]

Clause Function

Introduction

Let’s begin with the very first verse of the Bible (and of course our sequence that we’re talking about), .

I have removed some of the punctuation in my translation here, so let’s read:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth

Now the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters

And God said, “Let there be light”

And there was light

Independent or Dependent?

has both independent and dependent clauses.

I took out the periods in the way I translated the sentence, because I don’t want to sort of telegraph anything and I don’t want to bias any particular reading, even though these verses are very, very, very familiar.

We need to recognize, in terms of our analysis of these verses, that there are both independent and dependent clauses, and the Hebrew—not the English, not the way it’s sort of scripted out—will dictate that to us.

I’ll point those things out as we proceed.

The Interpretive Key

Knowing how Hebrew identifies each kind of clause is going to be our interpretive key to understanding how to read these verses properly, and also how they open the door to different possibilities in terms of, What is really communicating, and what isn’t it communicating?

What does the text allow in terms of the way we think about what’s going in these first three verses?[3]

The Traditional View

Introduction

We’ve talked about the two kinds of clauses—independent and dependent clauses—and now we are in am going to describe first the traditional view.

This is the way most Christians would read the first three verses of Genesis.

Just so that we’re clear, this is not the reading, and it’s not the interpretive slant that the Hebrew grammar gives us.

This is just the way that most people would approach the three verses.

The First Creative Act and the Result

If we begin,

In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth

Now the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters

And God said, “Let there be light”

And there was light

The way I read that suggests that the first creative act of God is in the first verse—“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”—and it makes verse 2 a resulting circumstance of what happens in verse 1.

So when God created the heavens and the earth, this is how it looked: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

God creates, this is the result, and then God goes back to work, so to speak, in verse 3, and we have God saying, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

This is a traditional way to approach this.

We have an initial creation—God’s first creative act, verse 1; and then verse 2 is the result; and then verse 3 is another main or independent thought.

An Alternative View: A Dependent Clause