Creation of the Universe by the Word of God (1:1-31)

This week I felt acutely the Hebrew wisdom that no one under 30 study Genesis. In one sense, the grandest moment of all history (its very creation) is simply summarized into around 400 words. Yet, every word and phrase seemed to reveal a rabbit hole of intrigue and study.

The beginning and ending of Ezekiel, the third of the four, are involved in so great obscurity that like the commencement of Genesis they are not studied by the Hebrews until they are thirty years old.[1]

Disdaining the myth-laden concepts of the ancient world and disregarding any attempt at scientific sophistication either ancient or modern, the text charts a course of theological affirmation that results in a picture of an ordered, purposeful cosmos with God at the helm, masterfully guiding its course. [2]

Since we have people under thirty listening this morning, I am going to do my best to not crawl into any of those curious labyrinths 😊. Before jumping into the first chapter of Genesis, let us take just a moment to once again capture a vision of the whole book all the way down to the specific context of chapter 1.

Overview of Text

I. Overview of Genesis

a. Chapters 1-11 summarize the events of God’s interaction with his creation from its inception up to Abrahams calling (ch. 12:1-2).

b. Chapter 12-50 consists of God’s covenant with Abraham and his offspring.

i. Abraham (12-24)

ii. Isaac (25-26)

iii. Jacob (27-36)

iv. Joseph (37-50)

c. Chapters 1-11 consists of three rotations of choice, corruption, judgment, and promise.

i. Begins with God creating the ideal

ii. Adam to the Fall. Adam and Eve are offered a choice to submit to the sovereign Creator or choose self-autonomy. They choose self-autonomy, leading to corruption and judgment in the form of death and exclusion from the garden. Yet, God, amid his judgment offers a promise to provide redemption through the offspring of Eve.

iii. Cain to the Flood. Humanity has another opportunity to choose submission or self-autonomy. Cain kills Abel. Lamech spirals into darkness, and generation after generation (ch. 5) continues to spiral into corruption to conclude in Genesis 6:5 “every intention of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was evil continually.” God judges the world with a Flood and destroys everything save that which was spared in the Ark (which is a picture of Christ and the salvation we would experience in Christ). Additionally, God made a promise with Noah that he would never “strike down every living creature” as he had done (8:21).

iv. Noah to Babel. Humanity has another opportunity to choose submission or self-autonomy. Noah gets drunk and Canaan has an inappropriate interaction with his drunk father in the tent. Generation after generation (ch. 10) spirals into further corruption resulting in God’s judgment at Babel. Yet, at this point, God once again makes a promise. He promises Abraham one of his offspring will bless the whole world (12:1-2).

II. God Creates the Ideal (1:1-2:3)

a. Verse 1 stands as a title for the chapter.[3]

b. Verse 2 both describes the earth prior to culmination of creation on day 1 and offers a brief breakdown of the 6 creation days.

i. The earth was “without form (tohu) and void (bohu).”

1. Bohu always occurs with tohu. While “without form” may refer to emptiness, it also may refer to chaos and confusion. [4]

2. Routledge argues “Genesis 1 does point to God as the originator of all things, and also to creation as an ordering of chaos, with little attempt to resolve that tension.”[5]

3. In contrast, Tsumura argues otherwise. He concludes “(hayétâ) tohû wabohû signifies the earth in a “bare” state, without vegetation and animals as well as without man. The author’s intention in de-scribing the earth in its initial state as tohû wabohû was not to present the earth as “the terrible, eerie, deserted wilderness” but to introduce the earth as being “not yet” normal.”[6]

ii. God’s first three days of creation seem to indicate the presence of chaos more than simple emptiness. Apparently, darkness and light were not distinct and separate. The waters on and around the earth were not established in their place.

c. God takes the first three days to bring order to the chaos (1:3-13).

i. God separates light from darkness (1:3-5).

ii. God separates the water above from the water below (1:6-8).

iii. God separates the sea from the land and produces vegetation[7] (1:9-13).

d. God takes the second three days to fill the now ordered earth (1:14-31).

iv. God fills the skies with the sun, moon, and stars (1:14-19).

v. God fills the sea and air with birds and fish (1:20-23).

vi. God fills the land with animals and mankind (1:24-31).

III. Note the pattern within each day.

a. God speaks.

b. And it is so . . . or . . . and there was light (1:3).

c. And God saw that it was good (except for day 2 potentially due to the fact that God wasn’t done with his work involving the water).

d. And there was evening and there was morning the first day.

i. The day Yom can mean something other than a 24-hour period.[8]

ii. Both the numbering of each day and the use of “evening and morning” strongly indicate that yom refers to a 24 hour period.

In this chapter, however, it must carry its normal meaning. Support for this view includes the following: (1) elsewhere, whenever yôm is used with a number, it means a twenty-four-hour period; (2) the Decalogue bases the teaching of the Sabbath day on the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest; (3) from the fourth day on, there are days, years, signs, and seasons, suggesting that the normal system is entirely operative; and (4) if yôm refers to an age, then the text would have to allow for a long period of “day” and then a long period of “night”—but few would argue for the night as an age. It seems inescapable that Genesis presents the creation in six days.[9]

Theological Implications

God remains the singular and sole sovereign Creator. God is singular in that He is One, contrasted to the polytheistic view of the ANE. God is the sole Creator and as a result appropriately deserves and demands all creation to submit to his singular rule.

The psalmist models such an appropriate response to God’s creative work in Psalm 104.

Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty . . . He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters; he makes the clouds his chariot; he rides on the wings of the wind . . . He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved . . . the waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth . . . From your lofty abode you water the mountains . . . He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting. You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about . . .

O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it. These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.

May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works, who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke!

[The Psalmist’s response to the greatness of God.] I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more! Bless the Lord, O my soul! Praise the Lord! (Psalm 104).

God transforms chaos into that which is very good. God takes that which is chaotic (without form), empty, and meaningless (void) and produces something which is “very good.” We jump ahead of ourselves a bit, but as revealed in chapter 3 and continually throughout Scripture, man takes that which is good and corrupts it into something which is chaotic, empty, and meaningless.[10]

Scripture reveals both of those principles in the first three chapters and they remain true throughout the rest of Scripture. Gloriously, even though man tends towards chaos and corruption, in Christ, God takes corrupt and chaotic man and produces a new creation – old things are passed away and all things become new.

God determines every created thing’s proper place. “From the beginning God’s people would thus learn that God makes divisions.”[11] Due his sovereign control, God can determine what goes where. He determines appropriate structure and placement. He separated light and darkness. He separated the sky from the water below. He separated the water from the land.

“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’? (Job 38:8–11).

He determined and placed the ideal. He created animals for the water and created animals for the land and sky. He placed mankind as the stewards and gave man dominion over every living thing. He determined it was not good that man was alone and created woman.

Not only does God determine every created thing’s proper place but also determined the order of importance of every created thing. God crafted everything prior to man’s creation, so that all creation was set for man to be brought in and care, maintain, and administrate creation. Mankind is the climax of God’s creation. God created man in his own image, and God gave man dominion over the rest of creation.

Elevating animals to equality with man is a corruption of God’s design. Not caring for the earth is a corruption of God’s design. Transgenderism is a corruption of God’s design. Homosexuality is a corruption of God’s design.

God designed and created everything, and he has the right to determine everything’s proper placement, function, and order.

The means of God’s creation is His Word.

The Holy Spirit is the agent of transformation.

Footnotes

[1] St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works, vol. 6, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (Christian Literature Company, 1893), 101.

[2] John H. Walton, Genesis, NIVAC (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 65.

[3] There is debate over whether verse one should serve as a title for the chapter. The debate is probably worth delving into at some point, but for now, I saw no reason to look any further.

[4] Ronald F. Youngblood, “2494 תהה,” R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr, and Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, New Edition (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2003), 964. “תֹּהוּ (tōhû) confusion. תָּהֳלָה (tohŏlâ) error (Job 4:18). Confusion, the empty place (Job 26:7; ASV “empty space”; RSV “the void”), nothing, nought, vain, vanity, waste, wilderness, without form.”

Elmer A. Martens, “205 בהה,” Harris, Jr, and Waltke, 92. “בֹּהוּ (bōhû) void, waste, emptiness. Always occurring with tōhû “waste”, bōhû describes the primordial condition of the earth, “void” at the beginning of creation (Gen 1:2), or “made empty” by God’s judgment (Isa 34:11; Jer 4:23). It is probable that the descriptions in Isaiah of the desolations of Edom and those in Jeremiah of Israel borrow this phrase from the Genesis picture of a primordial chaos.

[5] Robin Routledge, “Did God Create Chaos?: Unresolved Tension in Genesis 1:1-2,” Tyndale Bulletin 61, no. 1 (2010): 69.

[6] David Toshio Tsumura, Creation and Destruction : A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 33. “In conclusion, the phrase tohû wabohû in Gen 1:2, which is traditionally translated into English “without form and void” (rsv) or the like, simply means “emptiness” and refers to the earth, which was a desolate and empty place, “an unproductive and uninhabited place” (Tsumura, 35).”

[7] One author indicated that the Hebrews did not consider vegetation life. This would make follow in that God does not tell the vegetation to “be fruitful and multiply” as he does the birds and fish, animals and mankind.

[8] Leonard J. Coppes, “852 יוֹם,” ed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 370. “It can denote: 1. the period of light (as contrasted with the period of darkness), 2. the period of twenty-four hours, 3. a general vague “time,” 4. a point of time, 5. a year (in the plural; I Sam 27:7; Ex 13:10, etc.).”

[9] Ross, 109.

[10] Allen P. Ross, Creation and Blessing: A Guide to the Study and Exposition of Genesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998), 103. “This creation narrative traces how God transformed the chaos into the cosmos, turned darkness into light, and altered that which was unprofitable to that which was good, holy, and worth blessing.”

Ross, Creation and Blessing, 99. “It demonstrates convincingly and graphically the need for God’s blessing in the world; for ever since humankind acquired the knowledge of good and evil, evil became the dominant force, bringing corruption and chaos into God’s creation and incurring the divine curse. This prologue explains why God called Abraham and inaugurated a program of blessing through his covenant.”

[11] Ross, Creation and Blessing, 108.