The Beginning

Introduction (why Genesis?)

Have you noticed recently that lots of people believe something that you believe is false? It doesn’t matter what side of an argument you’re on, it seems like there is enough data out there to “prove” that you’re right. And yet, for all the effort hat you might bring to show that your point of view is best, your friend or neighbor or even your family member remains completely unconvinced.

Many, many years ago the majority of people in western countries believed that the earth was the center of the known universe, and that the sun we saw moving across the sky was in fact moving across the sky around the disc of a flat earth. It was an observable fact! Anyone who contradicted this most obvious truth was bonkers crazy. Most people today have changed their view because we have a new set of Evidence. We have modern math, a more robust understanding of the laws of physics, a new understanding of light, a better grasps of the laws governing gravity, and a myriad of photographic evidence from planes and high-altitude balloons and rockets and satellites and the space station and even a solar probe. These new evidences demonstrate the truth that the earth is a rough sphere, and that it orbits around the sun. We know that our sun is one of many billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, which is itself one of billions of galaxies in the universe. Despite all this evidence, many people remain unconvinced.

There is another popular opinion about the earth that a majority of people believe—evolution. People believe that the earth is an accidental blob of rock and organic material that is the result of some ancient coincidence that eventually gave birth to life, and that life has adapted and evolved to become the huge ecosystem of plants and animals that we see today. It’s a theory proposed and supported by scientists. Over the last 160 or so years evolutionary theory has adapted and expanded to incorporate new evidence that is uncovered.

The theory of Evolution is a robust set of ideas, and some of them are incontrovertible, like the evidence that plants and animals all have the ability to adapt and change in fairly short periods of time. This is called microevolution, and it’s more than a theory—it’s a fact.

A lot of other evidences that science explores to try to understand how life developed have a wider variety of potential answers. The theory of evolution is certainly one way to piece the evidence puzzle pieces together, but so is the theory of creation. Inteligent people from both sides of this debate look at the same pieces of evidence and come to wildly different conclusions. And neither side can convince the other side they are right.

We’re about to open up the first book of the Bible to discuss origins. I want to state from the outset that I’m not here to change your mind about anything—agree with me or don’t, I’m not here to argue about it. What I want to do is is invite you to take a step in faith.

You see, the biggest challenge in the exploration of how life works is the issue of the origin of life, or abiogenesis as evolutionary science calls it. How did life begin? Its a simple question but the answers are not easy to come by. The evidence doesn’t give the answers, just clues.

A common theory is that Goldilocks planets like earth—planets that aren’t too hot or too cold and have liquid water on the surface—are great breeding grounds for life, with all the amino acids and chemicals present to form life. All that’s needed is a spark of energy to get the chemicals to do their thing and form little single cell organisms. The problem with this theory is that it should be repeatable, and yet scientists simply can’t demonstrate that this theory works in real life. Test-tube life has basically been demonstrated to be impossible.

Other theories suggest that life began in crystal beds or bubbled up from the depths of the ocean or formed in cooling volcanoes.

In his documentary on Intelligent Design called Expelled, Ben Stein interviewed proponents of intelligent design and proponents of evolution. Towards the end of the documentary Ben asks several evolutionary scientists about the origin of life. They proposed several theories, but they all affirmed that no one really knows how life began. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, persisted in saying that no one knows how the first self-replicating cell came to be. But Ben Stein pushed and pushed and Dawkins finally told him what he thinks is an intriguing possibility for the origin of life. This is what he said:

“It could be that in some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, by probably some kind of darwinian means, to a very very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. …that is an intriguing possibility.”

Evolution does its best to explain how life developed in the absence of a creator, but it cannot explain how life came from matter. In fact, it can’t even explain how matter came into existence.

The joke goes like this:

God was once approached by a scientist who said, “Listen God, we’ve decided we don’t need you anymore. These days we can clone people, transplant organs and do all sorts of things that used to be considered miraculous.”

God replied, “Don’t need me, huh? How about we put your theory to the test. Why don’t we have a competition to see who can make a human being.”

The scientist agreed, so God suggested they do it like he did it in the old days when He created Adam.

“Fine” said the scientist as he bent down to scoop up a handful of dirt.”

“Whoa!” God said. Shaking his head in disapproval. “Not so fast. You have create your own dirt.”

When you try to explain the origin of matter without a creator, you violate the fundamental laws of physics that we have discovered and repeatedly proven in experimentation. Like the law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics, that says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transferred or changed from one form to another. Even the big bang theory starts with something. They say it was an infinitesimally small thing that was so densely packed with energy and stuff—in fact, all the stuff that makes up our universe today—that it finally exploded in a superheated bang that created the elements on our periodic table and began the process of forming stars and planets and ultimately life.

Scientists observe that the evidence that points to an expanding universe and they ask the question, why? Because they have ruled out the possibility of a creator, they don’t even look in that direction. Instead, they say the most logical explanation is that it all had an origin point and a massive amount of energy—a big bang—to launch everything out into a never-ending expansion.

The Bible has a different explanation:

Psalm 104:1–2 NLT

Let all that I am praise the Lord. O Lord my God, how great you are! You are robed with honor and majesty. You are dressed in a robe of light. You stretch out the starry curtain of the heavens;

One group of people begin with the assumption that God can’t be real, and the explanations they make up to answer the evidence are filled with random chance.

In this Genesis series we’re going to be exploring the story of how things began—the origin of stuff, of people, of evil, and of redemption. Unlike evolutionary scientists, we’re going to start with an assumption that there is a creator God. This is both a step in faith to believe in the possibility that God exists, and also a logical conclusion.

Shortly after Russia opened up to the Christian influence, Mark Finley took a team over there to talk about the gospel. He tells the story about when he preached to a crowd of atheist students at one of the universities there. He started by asking how many of them were atheists—how many of the students did not believe it is possible that God could exist, and basically everyone raised their hand. Then he asked them if they knew about everything in the universe and they responded with a confident, “no.” He suggested that at most we may know 95% of all there is to know about the universe and life. His audience willingly admitted that there is at least 5% of all the possible knowledge that we don’t know yet. Then Mark Finley asked this question, “Is it possible that in the 5% of knowledge that we don’t know, God may exist?”

If you say, yes, it’s possible that God exists, then you can’t completely leave out the possibility of divine intervention and even creation.

Back in the 1300’s a theologian and philosopher named William of Ockham suggested a method of reducing complexity for decision making. His suggestion is widely used in science, healthcare and many other fields today. In layman’s terms he said that if there are two or more possible solution to a problem, the simplest one is probably right.

If you have a broken down fence post and your options are:

A white unicorn with a rainbow horn knocked over the fence post on his way to finding his best friend the beaver, or

The car in the field hit the fence as the driver careened off the road in a drunken stupor.

The solution is probably the drunk driver and his car. There is no need to manufacture complexity when you have a perfectly logical and simple explanation at hand.

What evolution asks us to do is to mount happenstance on top of coincidence, and complexity on top of complexity.

Instead, we’re going to begin with a logical assumption—it’s possible that a creator God exists. And we’re going to add a faith component onto that assumption—God does exist, and He has revealed himself through the Bible.

As we step into the Bible I’m going to propose that we look at this document with the understanding that it is a historically accurate document. The actual stories it tells about people and places have a pile of extra-biblical evidence to demonstrate their veracity. It’s the miraculous things that people tend to look sideways at. But lets keep that mindset of faith and say the entire Bible, including the miracles, is historically accurate.

It’s ok to bring an element of faith into the question of origins because even evolution requires a form of faith. We have to begin with an assumption that we believe has the possibility of being correct, and then build our theories on that assumption. Evolution is based on a faith assumption that macroevolution really does occur and that the origin of life was a coincidence of nature. That’s not a small amount of faith to muster to believe that. It’s culturally popular to believe in evolution, though, so many people simply say, “that’s what I believe to.” My faith is based on the assumption that God exists, that he created, and that He revealed himself to his creation through the Bible. What do you believe? Are you willing to take a step of faith with me? I hope you are.

Let’s look at that creation account in Genesis 1.

The Creation Account — a review of the structure and details

Genesis one is the first page of an anthology of books, and it sets us up for understanding every other story that the Bible tells.

The first line in this page says,

In the beginning God created the skies and the land. (v 1)

Your version probably reads, “heaven and earth,” but the Hebrew words really are talking about the skies and land that we can see. The rest of the chapter adds detail to this first line.

One things that you need to note about the Bible is that this is a series of books about the God who created our world, and the beings that he created in this world—primarily humans. So when the Bible says, “in the beginning” it is most certainly talking about the beginning of our world. Since the Bible makes it clear that God made everything that was ever made, we can safely assume that God also created all the other planets and stars of the universe, and all the other beings in the universe, such as the angels. But, while that assumption is a logical next step, the story of Genesis One is a very localized story, bound to the confines of this world and what we see through the canopy of our atmosphere. Time for us began when God said, “let there be light.” That was the beginning of our story. Repeatedly, different Bible authors talk about God as having existed from eternity to eternity, that he always was and always will be, and that he is the first and the last. And the story in Genesis agrees with this thinking about God.

Verse 2 adds to the picture when it says,

The earth was formless and empty (v 2)

The words “formless” and “empty” rhyme in Hebrew. In fact, this whole chapter is a type of poetry and is written with symmetry and beauty.

This phrase, “formless and empty”, or “without form and void” in the NKJV, is the Hebrew concept of what existed before God created—nothing. The next phrase basically says the same thing:

and darkness was over the face of the deep.

These phrases point to darkness and chaos—nothingness and purposelessness.

Next we discover that God was there in the nothingness:

And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

It isn’t as though the water predates God, the formless, void is being portrayed as a sea of water—a vast, black, nothingness. When science fiction writers talk about future space travelers they sometimes picture them as sailing, as though the vacuum of space is a sea that can be navigated and sailed upon. This is exactly the same metaphor that the Bible writer is using. God came to a place in His universe where there was nothing, and decided to build something there.

In Psalm 90:2 one song writer said this:

Psalm 90:2 ESV

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

In order for you and I to be creative we have to pull together our ingredients. For a baker it’s spices and flours, for an artist its paint and canvas, and for a builder its wood and steel. Once we have our ingredients we can make something. But that’s not how God does it. He goes to a place where there is nothing and then he speaks.

Put empty space in front of God and you get a creative opportunity.

Then God said, Let there be light” (v 3)

God spoke and things began to exist.

If that Psalm can be trusted then God does wraps himself in light—God chose for light to exist—He designed it.

Each day of the creation account in Genesis 1 begins like this

“Then God said,”

and ends with

“And the evening and the morning were the _______ day.”

For six days this pattern continued. Each day God spoke something into existence.

The first three days God creates the realms of Light, of Sky and seas, and of Land. Then the last three days God filled each of the realms. He filled the realm of light with the Sun moon and stars, he filled the realm of sky and seas with birds and fish, and then he filled the realm of land with animals and finally humans—Adam, which simply means, “mankind.”

After these first six days the author makes this statement:

Genesis 2:1 NLT

So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed.

He’s pointing back to the beginning statement, “in the beginning God created the skies and the land” and saying, “yep, that really did happen.”

This is a logical, rational, and simple explanation of the origin of life. An all-powerful God that has existed for all eternity, spoke it into existence. Sure, if there is no possibility that an all-powerful, eternal God exists, then this isn’t a simple explanation—it’s just fantasy. But by the very laws of physics we know that energy isn’t created or destroyed, it’s only transferred or converted into something else. And wouldn’t there need to be an all-powerful being with infinite energy to create something from nothing? It’s honestly no more fantastical of an idea than to believe that an infinitesimally small blob contained an infinite amount of energy and just happened to explode into everything we see today. That’s even more difficult to believe than the God story—except its not popular to believe in God in our atheistic culture. In fact, believing that God seeded our world with life is not unlike Richard Dawkins suggestion that a very highly inteligent race brought life on this earth. Yet, Mr Dawkins, you didn’t go quite far enough. God isn’t just an alien life-form that seeded life here, He is the origin of all life everywhere. That’s the logical next step that Mr Dawkins and others refuse to consider as a possibility.

Identity and purpose — God’s and mine

Richard Dawkins alien race theory may explain how life began, but, like the evolutionary theory, it is devoid of purpose. What is the point of life? Evolutionary theory would suggest that the point of life is to survive at all costs, procreate with as many other individuals in your species as possible, and then become part of the grand circle of life—fertilizer for other life to consume, in other words.

But the Bible gives a very different reason for life—God created Adam and Eve for relationship.

Let’s read about it Genesis 1:26-ff

Genesis 1:26–30 NLT

Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” Then God said, “Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food. And I have given every green plant as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the small animals that scurry along the ground—everything that has life.” And that is what happened.

A relational God—the Us in this passage—designed humans to be his partners in Creation—filling the earth—and in rulership—being governors over the earth.

This origin story reveals a lot about God’s identity, and about our identity.

While the first six days reveal a lot about the creator, and quite a bit about us humans, there’s another aspect to the creation account that gives us an even deeper understanding of God. Look at what happened on the day after God finished creation:

Genesis 2:2–3 NLT

On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation.

The seventh-day of creation shows us what God intended for mankind—to rest in His finished creation and be His partners in the world. In Exodus we read the purpose a little clearer:

Exodus 20:8–11 ESV

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

God designed us for work, and he designed us for rest. We didn’t make creation, and so we rest in God’s completed work on the seventh day. But the other six days we faithfully go about our work of governing what God has created. We are His ambassadors, His representatives and His partners.

Maybe one of the reasons people don’t want to consider the possibility of God is that cultures throughout time have obscured God’s true identity and His intention for mankind. Some cultures think of us as God’s slaves, always working to appease Him so He doesn’t destroy us. Others have pictured us as God’s accidents, doing our best to hide from His anger. Other cultures have portrayed us as gods in our own right—with mystical powers and supernatural essences. Today, our culture would like us to believe that we are natural accidents with no inherent purpose—that we must self-determine a wise course for our lives.

Most cultures portray a distorted view of God and a broken understanding of purpose. Here in Genesis we see a God that creates partners, sharing his authority with them, but inviting them to rest in His completed work. He created two distinct genders—male and female. He created humans with purpose—to work as his partners in creation and management. He didn’t create slaves, but children in his image—heirs and royalty.

There’s one more thing about the identity of God that we should add to this story: God is intimately involved in providing for the needs of humans. Look at the amazing home God made for Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:8-15.

You might imagine an entire world filled with budding trees and blossoming flowers as God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, but Genesis 2:5 seems to suggest that plants weren’t yet populating the whole earth when he bent down and created Adam. The grass at the foot of the trees was still spindly and thin. Maybe the trees were young and immature. But then,

The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

God could have left Adam and Eve to their own devices. He could have let them struggle to figure out their role, or to find a place to call home. But, like any good and generous father, He gave them a home, and outlined their responsibilities and their boundaries.

Eden was a beautiful place filled with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” I’m sure that God made arboretums, and grew fruit and nut trees around the garden. He must have provided the perfect setting for Adam and Eve to call their home so they could come back to it and rest after a days work. We don’t know if the garden was a few acres, or a few thousand acres. What we do know is that it was just the beginning model of what God intended Adam and Eve to do with the entire world.

Conclusion — Will you join God in his rest and rule?

Next week we’re going to finish up Genesis chapter 2 and uncover a grand conspiracy in chapter 3, but we don’t have to wait until next week to realize that we aren’t in Eden any more. That perfect picture of a God that walks around with humans in the cool of the evening is not our reality today. And we aren’t living in that perfect setting where there is no rain or cold. And that reality gap between what the Bible describes as God’s original design and what we experience today is probably a big barrier to many believing that this story is true.

As we uncover more pieces to the story, I believe we will discover that our experience of evil is actually another piece of evidence that points to the existence of God.

As we look at the evidence around us, let’s approach this question of origins with a fair bit of humility—recognizing that we can’t go back to find out how it all started. And, then lets give our biggest consideration to the most logical and simple answer that there is a loving, all-powerful designer.

As we take that step of faith we can look at the evil around us and say, “if God can tame the chaos and void of space, then he can do amazing things in my world today, too.

I believe that the Bible and all of God’s creation give us compelling, reasonable evidence to believe in a creator God who loves us, and who is working feverishly to get things back to the way He designed them to be.

The question is, what do you believe?

Are you designed by God, or an accident of natural selection?

Is your purpose designed into you by God or should you set out on a self-determinate quest to find who you “really” are?

Can you trust God with your future, or can you only hope to be a somewhat nutritious snack for the next life-form to grow out of?

What you believe about your origins will determine your course in life.

I hope you’ll believe in God, the loving creator who has invited you to rest in His creative and redemptive work, and I hope that you’ll join Him in some aspect of governing His creation.

I’m going to wrap up today’s sermon with an invitation to join me in a journey to read the entire Bible this year.

There are many different kinds of Bible study, and a rapid read through the entire Bible isn’t always the best way to use your devotional time. Stopping at a passage and carefully examining and meditating on its meaning is a necessary component of your devotional experience. If you don’t already have a devotional plan, I’d recommend that you pick a psalm and study it in-depth, or select a story and explore all of its intricacies. Devotional Bible study is essential for our Christian experience. However, we also need a survey of the Bible to keep things in context and understand the tightly woven themes throughout the Bible.

I’d recommend that every Christian read through the Bible every few years at least. If you sit down and read at a slow reader’s pace of 100 words per minute, you could read some books of the Bible in under 5 minutes, and many other in less than 10. Some of the longer books will take you an hour to read, while the longest books of Genesis, Psalms and Jeremiah will take you over five hours. Most people can read the Bible in around 70 hrs of total reading. That might sound like a lot, but lets put it this way: if you read the Bible for 15 minutes a day, six days a week, you’ll have read for 78 hrs by the end of a year—plenty of time to read the entire Bible through.

Just 15 minutes a day. If you already have a devotional time, you might dedicate some time at the beginning to prayer, 15 minutes for this reading plan, and then some time for more meditative devotional reading. If you don’t have a regular devotional time, this 15 minutes of Bible reading will be transformative for your Christian experience.

Everyone in the church today is going to get a little tract that you can keep in your Bible. For those of you watching from home, you can find this Bible reading plan at

amazingfacts.org/bible-study/bible-reading-plan

There are many different reading plans that work well. This particular plan combines readings from the old and new testament, and only has readings planned for 25 days of each month.

I’m going to be including the week’s reading plan in each of my weekly emails this year, and occasionally in sermons I’ll be referencing where we are in the Bible reading.

I hope by having a regular and somewhat united reading of the scriptures that our spiritual life as a Christian community will grow together in both knowledge and love.