In the Beginning–God - Genesis 1:1-2:3

1 In the Beginning – God Genesis 1:1-2:3 20210530 The author of all of life established order in the midst of chaos and he orders our chaos too! Introduc)on Just a few weeks ago Ben preached through Psalm 19 where we looked together at the tremendous blessing of God’s special revelaHon. God’s special revelaHon is the wriJen word. In that Psalm we read “…the tes&mony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple…” (Ps 19:7). Today we start as a church into a new book of the Bible where we will receive more of the LORD’s tesHmony and it will have the effect of making the simple wise. We begin today in the beginning of the Bible – in Genesis. In parHcular we will be focused on the seven-day creaHon account beginning in verse one and conHnuing through Gen 2:3. This, in and of itself, is going to be hugely impacYul in helping each of us understand God’s ordering of his creaHon. However, before we can jump into the message – as this is our first Sunday looking at Genesis together, I want to take a liJle Hme and dedicate it to introducing the book. Which reveals to us God’s story - CreaHon, Fall, RedempHon, and ConsummaHon. Friends as we move through the Bible the picture becomes more and more clear. In the book of Genesis, we have the crea)on account, we see the fall and the subsequent devastaHon, and we see a God who does not abandon sinful and fallen humanity but rather purposefully intervenes and promises redemp)on. By the Hme we get to the end of Genesis we are sHll lea wondering as to how the ulHmate plan of redempHon will be consummated – but a plan is obviously present and is being moved forward. And in this case God inspired Moses, by his Holy Spirit, to write the first five books of the Bible to help unfold this plan and to reveal this paJern of creaHon, fall, redempHon, and consummaHon. But when did Moses live? What language did he speak? What was the scienHfic understanding of his day across the ancient people groups he was aware of? The answers to these quesHons are extremely important to our subsequent study of the Scriptures. I’m not trying to make our study of God’s word more difficult so please don’t hear that – but we do have to take these things into consideraHon. For when we don’t, we end up reading into the text our Hme, our language, our scienHfic understanding, and the collecHve wisdom of our age. When this is done the result is murkier than we like. Let me therefore layout a broad introducHon to the book before us and delve into some of the helpful aspects of the Biblical narraHve found in Genesis. To start out with we have a creaHon account. This is what is given in Genesis 1 and 2. This has been an important part of every people group across the ages and an area we will be focusing on more today. The creaHon account in Genesis helps answer one huge quesHon right off the bat. That quesHon is how did it all start? – In the beginning – God. In the Biblical crea)on account we find that God has established a well-ordered home for himself to interact with us, his image bearers. Absolutely amazing – this is the creaHon. But it didn’t last long in the original state – our predecessors did not trust God just as we fail to trust God. Instead, they trusted themselves that they knew beJer than God and so they defied his good command and they sinned. This is the fall as given in Genesis 3. This helps explains why we have pain in this world, suffering, shame, guilt, death, and brokenness – all which issued forth from our rebellion at the fall. As we move through Genesis from chapter 3 through 11 we have a horrible spiraling out of control of humanity as they give themselves over to living in rebellion. I just have to say that even here we have hints that God will be working to redeem a people for his own possession. This comes out in God’s proclamaHon while speaking to the serpent in Genesis 3:15 “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Then again, we get a sense of God’s desire to redeem a people for himself during the great flood, 2 he sets aside Noah and his family, then makes a covenant with him at the end of chapter 8 and into chapter 9. But even this doesn’t last long and the generaHons from Noah make up the table of naHons which come together to approach God on their own terms and God confuses their language and scaJers them across the face of the earth (Ch11). Once chapter 11 concludes we begin to move away from the general and broad beginnings of the world and into the specifics of one parHcular family. In chapter 12 the story of how God will bring about redempHon takes on a more defined path – it will be through Abram, later Abraham. By God’s choice Abram is called out of his land and he obeys God – God declares that all the families of the earth shall be blessed through him. It is then affirmed by God more fully how this is to happen in Gen 15 and again in Gen 17 where the promises and covenants are established. The rest of the book explores the unfolding promise of how God sustains this family line. As we study Genesis, I trust you will be impacted by how faithful God is despite the unfaithfulness of his chosen people. In telling the story of Abraham’s descendants, we have Isaac, and his sons Jacob and Esau, then the 12 sons of Jacob. In all of these chapters we are lea a liJle dumbfounded as to how God is going to be glorified in the middle of such a mess. Let’s face it church we can be unsavory individually and corporately and yet God’s work of redempHon – as we know through all of Scripture – which links Christ to these promises as given in Genesis – gives us hope! For we are not desHned for hell, but rather we are desHned to be with God forever through the saving work of Jesus Christ. This has been God’s plan of redemp)on from the beginning and one we know will come about at the fullness of Hme for all who are chosen by God – none will perish who belong to him. There – quickly you see a massive book before us. Our intent is to preach larger secHons at a Hme. That means we are not going to be touching upon every verse. Which means that as a congregaHon we will have to be collecHvely reading and re-reading the text. It means we will have to be ready to ask quesHons and jump into conversaHons. Because here on Sunday mornings what we are wanHng to do is highlight God’s plan of redemp)on as it is being developed by paying parHcular aJenHon to the promises or covenants God has made. What we will see is that God is acHve in caring for his creaHon and zealous for his glory. Which is of course contrary to what we end up doing as sinners whether we are grouped together as naHons or acHng individually – our tendency is to pull against God’s order. Even in poinHng that out we seem to be acceleraHng towards disorder and chaos. This brings me back to where we are going to be spending our Hme in this first porHon of Genesis. Here in Genesis 1:1-2:3 where we have a very different picture. The picture we have is that: The author of all of life established order in the midst of chaos, and church, he orders our chaos too! In the Beginning (vv1-25) 1. v1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” a. This is how the Bible begins. As God begins to tell the story of all things, he chooses to begin with a creaHon account. Now think about this for a moment, as a Hebrew people who have been recently redeemed from their slavery in Egypt. This is before they have the books of the Bible, this is before they have had Hme to really consider what it means to be a calledout people set aside to fulfill God’s promise to their forefather Abraham. i. As slaves in Egypt, they would have been exposed to a creaHon account there. Every ancient people group had worked out a creaHon account to make sense of the world around them as they observed it. ii. Have you been exposed to any creaHon accounts as you have gone through this life? 3 b. God has given us this verse as a help. Verse one sits as a prelude to what is about to unfold. It is foundaHonal – for us to recognize what God is claiming from the first sentence of the Bible. He alone is sovereign and he alone has created all that could be called the heavens and the earth – which is another way to say everything! c. In this very unambiguous statement, where God is clearly claiming to be the Creator God, we find one place where ChrisHanity gets aJacked relentlessly. “You can’t possibly believe God created the earth!” “You can’t possibly deny science and say that God created everything!” or any number of variaHons on such quesHons are used. d. Let me just encourage you as listeners that as difficult as it might be to understand how God did all of this one thing is a great help to me is that our God who is supremely trustworthy states it. He states how he brings order to that which is disordered. i. The skepHcs cannot give an answer to how it all started. When they are being intellectually honest with their argument, they cannot answer with any certainty how it all began. ii. God begins his special revelaHon with – I did it. As we will see we don’t have the specifics (which I know we would like to have) but what we do have is a God who clearly claims to be preeminent and sovereign over all that has been made. e. He was there… 2. v2 “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” a. Please look with me at these verses in a manner that might be slower and more deliberate than you might in just reading through Genesis. What do you see here in verse 2? We see earth and we see darkness and we see the deep – the primordial ocean. We also see the Spirit of God present there. The descripHon of this place is one of chaos and disorder (tohu wavohu) . b. I bring this up because we have to see how God brings order to disorder through the creaHon account. We are hard pressed to say exactly how God created from what we see in this text but what we unmistakably will find is that God was present, he claims sovereignty, and that he puts all things in order. The world is not just lea to do its own thing it is carefully tended to by an acHve and sovereign God. c. If you are saying wait a minute – where did this stuff come from? Let me just say this is puzzling when reading v2 but I do believe God created everything, ex nihilo, that is out of nothing. I get that from clearer statements of Scripture: i. Jn 1:3 “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” ii. Heb 11:3 “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” 3. vv3-10 summary Boundaries are Set as God brings Order – God goes into a paJern here in the creaHon account. He creates light – previously it was darkness - but he brings forth light and separates them from one another categorizing the light as Day and the darkness as Night. 4 a. Do you see that this ordering has another impact on everything we experience in life? It gives us the basic element of Hme – our God, who is a God of order, establishes Hme. b. This is done all in a paJern of evening and morning – in this case on the first day. The Hebrew word is yom. i. We talked about this briefly at CG this past Thursday night. ii. I believe yom is a literal 24 hour period of Hme. iii. Some faithful ChrisHans say that a gap exists somewhere in the Hmeline. Either aaer Gen 1:1 or between each day in the creaHon order. No maJer where you might end up on the Hme factor, I would encourage you to think more about what God is saying in what he has given us. iv. And what he is saying is that he ordered creaHon in such a way that it was made uniquely hospitable to support life. He brought order to that, which apart from his sovereign control, would be disordered. c. That is why he goes right into describing how the expanse was separated, the waters from the waters. Some above and some below. d. Then another division on the next day of waters from the dry land – again ordering his creaHon making it uniquely hospitable to support life by establishing boundaries. 4. vv11-13 summary – Along with a separaHon of land from water is now a space to support vegetaHon which is the building block of what will be used to sustain non-plant species as they come into God’s ordered environment. a. The plants are able to reproduce aaer their own kind – producing seeds and bearing fruit. Again, here we have to slow down for a moment and ask a quesHon of what God is revealing. Is God saying that all the geneHc capacity of reproducHon is encapsulated in a small transportable form known as a seed? God designed the plant kingdom to regenerate itself through a process. i. I cannot run a calculaHon large enough – for one I wouldn’t know how to set it up – that could design enough Hme and account for enough variables needed for an evoluHonary process to successfully produce anything that would grow let alone that would produce a seed containing all that is needed to grow again – aaer its kind. ii. Yet here God succinctly states that he ordered the plant kingdom to do so in a few lines of Hebrew. 5. vv14-25 summary – God conHnues ordering his creaHon purposefully as the narraHve conHnues. Showing the placement of the lights in the sky – giving them a path to follow. a. I was marveling at this just this past week when a lunar eclipse was visible one morning from our house. I watched as the shadow of the earth covered the moon and I couldn’t help thinking about two things – one that I have been covered by the blood of Christ and two that God’s creaHon is so ordered that the orbs he has placed in the expanse of the heavens follow 5 a paJern so precise and predictable that they overlap from Hme to Hme and that can be forecasted. b. The other thing the moon in parHcular does is keeps the oceans from becoming stagnate. i. The moon helps generate the Hdes by gravitaHonal pull, then somehow the currents are present and they help circulate the waters, all promoHng the livability of the earth’s waters so that they can swarm with sea creatures. c. Similarly, the air is of such a makeup that it can support breathing and flying. In v22 “God blessed, them saying be fruiGul and mul&ply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds mul&ply on the earth.” i. This is seong forth another aspect of God’s created order that he wants, that he desires the creatures to be involved in the filling of the earth. I get the picture of God wanHng his creatures to enjoy what he has made! d. The land animals follow during day six and you see God has also established a hierarchy in the way he has created and ordered the earth. It wouldn’t make any sense to have brought the land animals on day one before there was land present. i. illus. Jack’s school ii. God brings order to chaos which says something about how he deals with our sin disorder in this life – which we will see throughout the storyline of Genesis aaer the fall when we discover that God has a plan for redempHon (Gen 3:15). TransiHon: Which brings us to the next major secHon in the text. Made in God’s image (vv26-31) 1. Let’s observe this next marvelous secHon of bringing about God’s plan of creaHon in the later half of day six. v26 “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, aJer our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”” a. The term “God” being used in the creaHon narraHve is Elohim, which looks like a plural form but in Hebrew this can also denote a term of respect. But this can be a liJle confusing because we know from Scripture that God is one (Dt 6:4) yet manifested in three persons (2 Cor 13:14) which leaves a slight quesHon as to what is being conveyed. The translators have helped us in keeping it a singular in English and using a capital G to denote the respecYulness of a proper noun. b. But here in v26 we get a very clear and deliberate first-person plural in the language. And it should grab our aJenHon! First-person plural God said, let us….in our image…aaer our likeness. So, in the very counsel of the Godhead man is created as a vice regent. To have dominion over the earth. c. This is a tremendous responsibility given to mankind. Tremendous responsibility but by God’s empowering and equipping it was so. 2. Now, just in thinking about the completeness of God in and of himself as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (Mt 28:19) look at how it is he images mankind in v27 “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” 6 a. Church, this is meant to be seen as a celebraHon. The writer changes over to the use of poeHc language to draw special aJenHon to this porHon of the creaHon account. God made man – adam – he made in his own image. Made them as male and female. A clear disHncHon is present: male and female. I can’t help but think of the clear disHncHons seen in the Godhead and yet he is one God (Eph 4:4-6). We are created in his likeness as male and female. b. He blessed them together as male and female and gave them a command to be fruiYul and to mulHple to fill the earth and to subdue it and once again to have dominion over every living thing. c. I have no doubt God was pleased with his creaHon and he was pleased with his ordering of creaHon and he was pleased to give this command to his image bearers for God saw everything that he made and declared it to be very good (v31). TransiHon: So oaen in our minds we stop here but we have a seventh day in the creaHon account. Seven days of Crea)on (2vv1-3) 1. In this last secHon we look at when God finished his work. vv2-3 says, “…he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested…” 2. This is the creaHon account, this is where God prescribed order to his creaHon, where we find funcHon in everything that is present. Each part of God’s creaHve work was deliberate. This seventh day is no different. What is it that is being described? a. Just think friends – this was before the fall – what is God doing with his things? He is enjoying them! He is wanHng to have worship and glory brought upon him as his creaHon funcHons as he designed it to funcHon. i. We get more on how this day was to operate in the life of the faithful aaer the decalogue – the law was given. But right here we should not read in that God is Hred. He “shabbated” he rested or he ceased from his creaHve work so that he could enjoy it. ii. illus: Trampoline 3. And yes, we are called to shabbat as well. What is it, we do when we take a break from creaHve work? We recognize that God is the one who brings order and stability – we can stop trying to bring order and stability into our own lives and idenHfy with our maker when we shabbat – when we sabbath. TransHon: As we draw our Hme in the word to a close, I’ll say it again: Conclusion The author of all of life established order in the midst of chaos and he orders our chaos too. He has provided us, his people, with this creaHon narraHve. We have it because it is foundaHonal to our belief in God and to our understanding of how we approach life. Just consider the following quesHons and how you answer them: Who formed the world and all that is in it? Did the one who formed all things do so in an orderly manner or disorderly manner? The way you answer these quesHons will have a direct impact on how much you are challenged by alternaHve creaHon accounts. What about how things in this world are to be used? Who has been granted dominion over the other created things (water, air, land, fish, birds, and animals Gen 1:26, 28-29)? How have we been doing in caring for God’s stuff? Speaking of humans what does it mean to be created in the image of God and how does that impact our view on the sancHty of human life, of every life from concepHon to natural death? When does the image of God no longer warrant protecHon? A big topic right now and one that is impacHng us all is the disHncHon 7 between male and female – God put things in order and he did so by creaHng us in his image as male and female. Did God make a mistake in this disHncHon? Have we ascended to such a place where we can say something contrary to our Maker or that we know beJer than him? (Ro 9:20) The truth of the maJer is that we don’t live before the fall we live aaer sin entered in, we live post fall. And although we are gathered here today as a ChrisHan body of believers there are likely some present who do not belong to Christ but nonetheless even with Christ atoning for our sins and making a way for us to be in right standing before God – being jusHfied by the blood of Christ – we are sHll lea trying to sort through a thick mess of sin. Sin has tainted everything. It has had its corrosive effect and so we are confused, we buy into lies, we go along with disordering God’s order. Just reference the quesHons we just covered. Think through the implicaHons of answering those quesHons according to what we saw in Scripture today…and then openly talking about your stance in the workplace or at school or with family. The ruler of this present age wants disorder he wants ruin. But the author of all of life established order in the midst of chaos and he orders our chaos too when we let him rule and reign as Lord!