Genesis 1:3-13

OK, so we are kicking off today,
Genesis chapter 1 again.
And I think we’re going to jump right into verse 3.
Is that right?
Yeah, I’m trying to wrap my head around hot Dr.
Pepper.
Oh,
not good,
Mark. That’s not good.
OK, friends,
we are kind of in the thick of it today.
We start the creation narrative.
We’ve had the preface in the beginning,
the earth was formless, void,
God moved,
and the breath, the wind of God, swept.
So then the first thing we get in creation is a word.
In this first chapter,
we mentioned this,
God speaks and things come into being.
It’s not work for God to create.
God doesn’t draw or build.
God simply says it,
and it exists.
So the first thing that happens is a word.
Let there be light,
and there was light.
And this entire chapter has a kind of refrain to it.
It’s almost poetry.
So you’re going to see that God said it,
and then there was.
And then God saw,
verse 4, that the light was good.
And this is another kind of refrain.
And then God’s action in this is often in this first chapter.
We mentioned this two weeks or a week ago.
One of the distinctives of this narrative is God separates.
So God speaks,
there’s light.
Then God sees that the light is good.
And then God separates the light from the darkness.
And then God names.
And essentially,
this is true through part of the story.
Later,
the human is going to be involved in this.
We’ll pick this up in a later story.
But in this initial part,
God is the one
who gives names, which is symbolic and important when
that task is later handed to the human.
But here, so we have day,
we have night, and then there was evening and morning,
the first day.
And so this is very much the pattern
that we’re going to see throughout this chapter.
Said it,
it existed,
saw it was good,
some separation,
some naming,
and then there was that day.
Right.
So maybe it’s hard to do
Genesis and get the whole scope of chapter one
until you read the whole chapter.
But what is interesting here is there’s light
before there is lights in the sky.
That you have the light exists before the scientific thing
that we would expect to make that light.
And so there’s a lot of conversation that this raises
regarding how we should understand this scientifically.
What I think this points us to so early in the book
is that once again,
scripture’s not starting from the same foundation that we do from our own bias.
Hence our start last week with a few sort of
orienting kind of ideas.
What we find so early here in this book
is that ultimately God is creating by naming,
as you say, Clint, and as he does that,
he starts with the most basic division
between darkness and light.
And this is not only a theme in Genesis
it actually carries throughout the entire Bible.
That at the fundamental sort of base of reality
there is darkness and misunderstanding and occlusion.
And there’s revelation and light and the ability to see.
It touches deep upon this human idea
of what is known and knowable versus what isn’t known.
It’s not on accident that we have light
coming out of darkness because the human experience
of darkness is that it’s a dangerous, disordered, chaotic place.
But right from the start,
God takes something that is by human standards often a place
of great vulnerability and God immediately
with but a word is able to create out of it
order and opportunity to create something
that can be known as opposed to something that can’t.
Right, and while we’re not in the fallen part
of the story yet,
in other words, there’s no sin, there’s no real problem with creation yet,
there is a kind of innate human assumption
that darkness is,
imagine a society pre-light,
right?
Pre-electricity.
Darkness is vulnerability,
darkness is confusion,
darkness is when you get lost,
darkness is when animals threaten.
There is a kind of bias toward the light
that is here already.
It’s not that night is bad,
it’s that it doesn’t belong in the light.
So God separates them and there is a time for each.
But as we move through,
you can see a fairly clear
assumption I think that light is preferable.
Then we move to day two.
God said,
let there be a dome in the midst of the waters
to separate the water from the water.
So God made the dome,
separated it, and God called the dome sky and there was evening
and there was morning the second day.
So one little change here,
we don’t get this reference about it was good,
which some people have made something of reality being,
I’m not sure that there’s a point there and if there is,
I would argue maybe we have lost it.
We also have to say here that as it is written,
we are dealing with a vertical worldview here.
And literally when it says a dome,
as we read early that God moved over the waters,
now there is this sort of glass picture like a bubble
that is over some of the creation.
And it keeps the water above from the water below,
though the water’s below have not really been,
they’ve not been in the picture yet.
There is a kind of timelessness in this.
And that dome is what keeps,
and from a primitive worldview,
how do we know that?
Well, for two reasons, the sky is blue and it rains.
So something must let the water that is above
come down on us occasionally.
Now, this is clearly not our understanding
of atmosphere and condensation,
et cetera, but it is if you look at it vertically,
this is how the creation is described.
And you can,
that can bother people, I suppose,
but this is a very literal vertical description
of how the creation was understood to work. So I wanna point out this next keyword
that we actually have in here.
And that is if you see here in verse four again,
sorry, verse four, where the light is separated from darkness.
Here we have, if you see down in verse seven,
that once again, the vault is separating the water
from that which is above it.
This is another critical sort of phrase here,
this idea of the separation is happening once again.
And let’s not lose the point here.
What we have separated is light from darkness
and water from water.
That these are essential components of all human life.
They have been since the very beginning.
So the idea that from the very start,
God is not only in control of these fundamental elements,
but God actually,
with a word,
made them so.
That God was able to separate the bone
from the marrow in human language.
The idea that God was able to take these cosmic forces
and make them order into life-bearing possibility.
This happens within these first two sections
of the creation narrative. Yeah, I think that’s exactly the right word, Michael, ordered.
In Genesis one,
creation and order
are the simultaneous works of God.
To be created is to be in order.
So not only is God making things,
God is organizing things.
There is a fundamental order to this creation story.
We see it in the way the days are laid out.
We see it in the way that the days happen.
And this theme of separating
is probably the clearest expression of that.
So then we move to day three here.
And God said,
let the waters under the sky
be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear.
And so it was.
God called the dry land earth
and the waters that were gathered together, he called seas.
And God saw that it was good.
Then he said, let the earth put forth vegetation,
plants yielding seed, fruit and trees of every kind,
that bare fruit with seed in it,
and it was so.
And the earth brought forth vegetation,
plants yielding seeds of every kind,
and trees of every kind,
bearing fruit with the seed in it.
And God saw that it was good.
And there was evening,
and that there was morning,
the third day.
So here we have,
we’ve had this natural movement.
We’ve had cosmic light and dark.
We’ve had water from water.
Now we have in that land under that space under the dome,
we have water from land.
And the land goes about its task of producing plants
according to their seed.
Again, we have an order that is happening.
All of this spoken into being by God,
and all of it judged by God to be good. God is an ordering God.
And we,
when we think of nature,
I think we often think of it as checks and balances
holding itself in order that you have the prey,
and you have the predator,
you have the water that cuts through channels.
We think of it in very sort of naturalistic kind of
matter of course sort of logic.
But that’s a very modern way to understand it.
The ancient people recognized
that there was blessing in order.
That the fact that things produced,
things of like kind,
was mysterious and joy filled.
There’s something beautiful about how there was
a constant repetitive kind of thing
that happened around you,
even though life could be chaotic.
And though there was disorder in the midst of the order,
the very fact that there was a kind of order
to the world that surrounded was amazing.
And here we see that this idea that God not only made
things that could bear fruit,
that those things when they do,
do so according to a particular order and pattern.
And this fits into this larger Old Testament narrative
that ultimately God is not only the creator,
as in from the very beginning,
but God is the architect.
God is the one who’s written the blueprint
for how things should and will work.
And so we’re beginning already within
just a few short verses to be getting this sense
that there’s actually a rhythm to the creation.
It’s not just that God separates these cosmic forces,
it’s that there’s a kind of reproduction
and continued life that God has built into the system
and that God is even ordering it
from the foundations of the earth.
So there’s a kind of mystery,
a kind of constantness to it that is intended, I think. Right, and we’re halfway through the creation story
and we have the earth,
the sea,
the sky ready
for moving on.
And so tomorrow we’ll look at the next three days.
Sometimes these are divided into the forming days
and the filling days.
So in the first three days,
things are formed and then the things that have been formed are filled.
They’re filled with animals,
they’re filled with birds,
they’re filled with vegetation.
This is the sort of transition in that
as we end this third day seeing it was good.
So the structures are in place.
There’s fruit,
there’s water,
there’s sky,
there’s night,
there’s day,
there’s everything ready
for what comes next.
The home is now built and ready to be habitated.
And interestingly enough, that includes the cosmos,
the dome itself, as God will put things in it to start with.
And we’ll talk tomorrow about the symmetry
of the next three days and how they correspond
with the first three.
But we’re halfway through and much has been done, obviously. Right,
and I’ll be brief with this
and this isn’t a traditional way of reading Genesis
but I just wanna give you a little context
for what some of the ancient Christians did
as they came back to this text and they read it.
This actually comes from 2 Corinthians chapter four.
This is verse five,
sorry, verse six here.
For God who said let light shine out of darkness
made his light shine in our hearts
to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory
displayed in the face of Christ.
And what I think is so interesting about this
is it is turning back to that very image
that we were talking about,
the idea of the light separated from darkness
and we see it explicitly connected
to the revelation of Jesus Christ.
That’s not an accident.
This is Christians turning back to Genesis
and seeing in these words something
that its original writers wouldn’t have intended
but that clearly is within the arc
of God’s intended revelation,
right?
It’s that beauty of scripture,
that thing happens where God is writing this account
of God’s revelation to humanity
but doing so through humans.
It’s a beautiful mystery
and I just think I wanna share with you.
It’s a wonderful way that you can see
how Christians saw this creation narrative
and they saw in it more than just nuts and bolts
and sort of the structure of naturalism.
They saw in it real revelation of even Jesus Christ
and I think that’s a beautiful kind of reflection
as we look at it together. Yeah, I think in the tens of thousands of years
that preceded the modern age,
this story was very much understood
to be a spiritual story as much as it was a physical story
and we have perhaps lost some of that
because we have so emphasized its role as a physical story
and challenged it along those lines,
scientific grounds
but there is deep spirituality in this story.
God speaking,
things existing,
light versus dark, order and kind and separation and movement.
There are deep spiritual themes in this
that our ancestors really took for granted. Well,
I think that’s what we have for you,
friends. Yeah, hey, thanks for being with us.
We’ll be back tomorrow. See ya.