Genesis 1:1-2

Alright,
well, if you’re joining us by podcast today,
the great irony is you are seeing
as much as the people who are watching this on video.
I wish we’d done this on purpose.
In the beginning,
there was nothing.
It was darkness over the face of the deep.
And today we have darkness.
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who unfortunately is not working.
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Alright, so as we promised,
thanks for sticking with us last week as we did introductory work.
We’re now going to kick off with Genesis chapter one,
verse one.
And as you named,
you know,
the earth was formless and empty.
So here we go.
Yeah, so in the beginning, God,
this is where the story starts.
And we have this in Hebrews,
just a couple of words,
and we tend to get caught up in the
created as we probably should in the creation story.
But it is significant that before the word created,
we get the word God in the beginning.
There is no beginning without God.
It is God’s movement that
creates not only what will follow,
but that creates a beginning,
creates a place to start.
And this is
that account.
And as you probably know,
there are two accounts that in Genesis one and Genesis two,
they are each going to share a creation narrative.
And they’re not
fundamentally opposed to one another or anything like that,
but they are different.
And I want to just point out as we get in,
one thing that I think will help.
In the book of Genesis,
Michael mentioned this last week,
we see the culmination of some sources,
some different places that stories came from.
And you will notice,
or we’d want you to notice,
that as we read through Genesis one,
you will see the word God,
capital G O D.
Now in Hebrew, that’s the word Elohim.
It means God.
It means Holy One.
It’s God.
And so you will see that that is the language consistently of this story.
When you get to chapter two,
you’re going to see the word capital L,
capital O, capital R, capital D.
And when you see the word Lord in all capital letters in the Old Testament,
that is the word Yahweh,
the sacred name of God in the Old Testament among the Hebrew people,
the Israelites.
And so that’s just one clue that these stories are told from different perspectives,
from different sources.
One is called the E source,
Elohim, and the other is called the J source.
Yahweh is essentially a J in Hebrew.
And in most of Genesis,
the stories that came from these sources have been kind of folded into one another.
And you will see the same material.
It may switch during a story.
But in Genesis one and two,
the people left them in two separate accounts.
And this is important because if we understand this is two versions of a family story,
and we get this one,
and it is different not only from the other one in the way that God
is referred to, but in the nature of how the story is told.
Yeah, I’d say that people probably,
when they think of the Genesis story,
they probably think of chapter one, verse one, they probably don’t think of the story that follows.
I think one of the reasons for that is because there’s a sense in which this story seems to us,
especially I think is modern people,
the more scientific sort of worldview,
it seems to us
the story that starts at the very beginning.
And it fits our vocabulary and our narrative in a way that maybe the second one,
it tells more of a human story,
more of a narrative.
And we start here with this idea of the very beginning,
that thing that is before all things.
And of course,
despite all of the conversations that have happened throughout the 20th century
about the Big Bang and sort of what starts all things scientifically,
this is the very beginning
from the lens, the frame of the biblical writers.
But what’s interesting is the mechanics of how these things happen is not really at all emphasized.
It’s rather a story from the perspective of how God is initiating the action.
So in chapter one, verse one,
it’s not about energy being exploding.
It’s not about a way of conceiving of how the physics might work or how all of this
might actually be kicked off.
It’s rather the simple declare the statement that God created the heavens and the earth.
It’s as much a statement of faith as it is a statement of reality.
And that is the beautiful sort of sounding alarm,
or it’s the sounding gun that kicks
off the rest of the scriptures.
And it does so,
I think, with quite a bit of simplicity.
And the thing that is interesting about this first chapter, it’s very orderly.
The second story is a little looser.
It sounds maybe a little older,
a little more ancient,
though these are both ancient stories.
But this story has a flow to it.
It has a kind of separation to it.
This is the story you know if you talk about day one and day two and day three.
That’s this story.
And in this story,
God is alone.
God is in darkness,
in nothingness.
There is God and there is nothing else.
And nothing is a very difficult concept for us to grasp because we always think of nothing
as the absence of something.
But here,
there is God and nothing else.
And God’s spirit is,
we reach the limits of language here when we try to talk about creation.
God’s spirit is hovering over.
Now, we know that there is no over.
There’s no surface.
There’s none of that.
But this is
imagery of how God moves.
That God is not static.
That God is doing something.
God is about to do something.
And one of the marks of this story is that when God decides something,
God simply speaks it into existence.
Such is the power of God that when God says it,
it then comes to exist.
There’s no work that God has to do in creation.
As God imagines and speaks,
so the thing comes into being.
And this is,
I think, a tribute to this story’s understanding of not only the creativity of God,
but the power of God.
God says it and it exists.
Right.
And the things framed here in verse 2 of the earth was formless and empty.
Darkness was over the surface of the deep.
These three things are all images of what is before God creates.
And therefore,
the opposite is true.
That
the form,
the fullness, and the light that happens in God’s creating are images of what God,
of who God is in God’s core.
And then ultimately,
what God makes when God creates the world so that we can participate in it.
That we can live in it.
So these themes actually will become substantial themes throughout the entire scripture.
In fact,
if you have a study Bible where they’ll put in the margins
cross-references to other verses,
my Bible about every other word has just about 20 different
cross-references throughout the scripture because of how frequently these things are
going to be mentioned.
So the idea of form, order,
a book like Leviticus,
it really just lives in this.
The idea that God made things with a certain pattern.
That pattern was on purpose.
This idea that God creates fullness out of emptiness.
This idea that later,
that humans are to be stewards of this world so that it might continue to be full.
And then this idea of light.
Of course, we have that all the way through the New Testament.
Even the Gospel of John picks this up.
The idea that Jesus Christ is the light.
We see in this revelation frame what God is communicating through the order of what God makes.
Has something to say about the craftsmen.
And in that, I think we see that we’re already beginning to unearth that the subject of Genesis
1.1 is not creation per se,
but the Creator at work.
Right.
And to some extent,
to read this spiritually,
is to understand that in these first two verses
of Genesis, we also see the mission of God
written throughout the rest of the Scriptures
to bring order,
to bring purpose,
to bring light to darkness and formlessness and emptiness.
That what God does here in the expanse of the about to be created cosmos is what God
will then also do in the very humans that he will create
to bring fullness and to work against darkness.
And this is,
I think,
to read this spiritually,
an understanding of what God is going to be
doing throughout the rest of the story after the creation happens.
I think tomorrow,
we will look at some of the days.
There’s some wonderful symmetry in this story.
This story was very carefully crafted to make each day significant and to make each day significant
in relation to the other days.
And we can talk about some of the flow of this creation story tomorrow.
But I think for today,
given our own darkness of video,
it is enough to say that when God
decides and moves, then this emptiness is about to change and new things,
things that have not
yet been, are about to come into existence.
Yeah, maybe last note as we come to conclusion,
the last section here of the Spirit of God
hovering over the waters,
this section here actually takes a very sort of unique emphasis
in the early Christian reading of the Old Testament.
Remember that to the earliest Christians,
this was the scriptures.
They didn’t have the New Testament as we understand it.
And so as they look back and saw this idea,
the Spirit of God,
which in the Hebrew,
I believe that’s Ruach, which is this word translated wind or breath.
The idea that we have Spirit of God here from the Christian context,
we generally interpret that.
We understand that to be the Holy Spirit,
but that’s unlikely what it meant when it was
originally written.
It was talking about the idea of God’s very inner essence,
the life of God,
the breath of God,
which of course is also the force that by which we do speak is our very breath.
So there’s this beautiful sort of later connection where Christians look at this and see the
breath of God hovering over the waters,
and they connected that to Jesus and his own baptism and
ultimately the baptism of the saints.
So while that’s not inherent in the Old Testament understanding of what this meant in its original writing,
it is a thing that Christians came back to and they saw following this formlessness and
this emptiness, God by God’s own spirit or life or breath hovering over these waters and this
beautiful Christian image of baptism,
this is something that’s been written about extensively
in the faith as well.
Right, and it’s a wonderful symmetry between story one and two,
and we’ll talk about this
when we get there,
but when, as you know, God breathes life into Adam,
this is the same word.
It’s breath, it’s spirit, it’s wind, it’s all of those things.
And so there’s some very nice points of connection in the language.
Well friends, thanks for being with us.
We look forward to seeing you tomorrow,
and maybe if everything goes well,
you seeing us tomorrow.
Yeah, literally seeing each other.
Talk to you later.