Genesis: How to Study Genesis

All right.
Now we are.
Now we’re ready to go.
So we’re looking at the book of Genesis today,
continuing our introductory material.
Yeah, so we will probably – I hope this doesn’t put anyone off – we will probably get into the
text of Genesis next week,
and this week we’re trying to use these three days to kind of prepare for that.
And one of the things we probably need to talk about is how do we read Genesis?
We touched on that a little bit yesterday,
and if you asked a lot of different Christians that question,
you would get a lot of different answers.
There are those that read Genesis – mentioned this yesterday as literal history.
If it says something took a day,
they take that to be a literal expression,
a 24-hour period.
If it says that the rain fell through a dome in the sky,
they take that literally,
particularly on the very far end of that.
Some of the religious, say,
flat-earth folks who believe
that that’s what is taught.
So you would find within the Christian family a portion of our family
who are going to take Genesis not only seriously,
but literally.
They’re going to believe that it’s teaching literal history.
And
I think all of us have probably interacted with that idea at some
point, though I think most of us,
as we find our way to the Presbyterian Church,
maybe don’t find ourselves quite as compelled by that idea.
Yeah, so actually Genesis, I think, is actually a good
example of a rule that follows for the rest of the Bible,
but I think the Old Testament in particular
is you see some of the very different styles of biblical scholarship very quickly in your study of these books.
And, you know,
unfortunately, I think especially in the beginning of the book of
Genesis, we get hung up on some of the differences in those,
and we miss how those differences carry
forward into the rest of the book.
And, you know, if you get a good commentary that’s going to
really have a broad look at some of the scholarship that’s done on Genesis,
what you’re going to find
is there’s a lot of holes.
It’s a lot more like Swiss cheese that is like a clearly defined block.
There’s a lot in this ancient book that we don’t know,
both culturally about the people who wrote it,
but also about the transmission of it.
And, you know, this is a thing that we don’t think about,
but in reality, it’s not just that this book was written,
but it was handed down generation to generation.
And there’s a whole lot of family work that’s been done in the collection of these
stories and then the editing of those stories.
And the form that we have now has surely morphed and
changed as the people carried it for generations.
And so, you know, what we do in modern scholarship
is seek to try to go back as far as we can,
get as ancient as we reliably can.
But realistically,
as you make that path backwards,
you’re going to encounter a lot of different people who have
touched and shaped these stories.
And I don’t find that particularly difficult.
To be honest, I find that quite freeing and inviting to remember that the scriptures have always been carried by community.
This has always been a family document.
And so what we have here is not just a reflection
of that original author,
it’s a reflection of those who have carried it forward to us.
And so if you have that in mind,
then when you come to Genesis,
you come with a little bit more
of a flexible framework,
a willingness to consider that there are things that are in this text that
are like bumps in the road.
And when we come across a bump,
instead of us trying to flatten it,
we might ask questions,
well, why is this here?
And what does that have to tell us?
And what might be the reason why either down the road,
why one of the family members didn’t edit this out?
Why would this still be here?
And I think Genesis is one of those books where this is both a relevant
sort of theological assumption as we come to it.
But I think it’s also a book that we turn to,
and we see the implications of it.
Because if one tries to flatten it,
and every word and every
sentence must be read literally as it comes to us in our English translations,
then it does away with some of that historical, contextual,
sort of fundamental.
Yeah, so the second way that
this is probably a more modern way,
though it may have been accepted
historically, but it was probably contested in the fairly recent part of human history,
is to read Genesis,
particularly the early portions of Genesis, as science.
And
there has, of course, been a lot of interest in an origin story of
the universe and human beings and the earth.
But when we read this as science,
we find ourselves in the position of trying to defend it
to scientists.
And I think we have to understand that’s not
what this book was intended to do.
So let me just give you a little example.
In a day or so,
in a few days when we get
into the text next week,
we’re going to read this business about God creating two lights in the sky,
one in the daytime and one at night,
which of course is a reference to sun and moon.
Well,
the science community eventually learned that the moon is in fact not a light at all.
It is a chunk of
matter that reflects light.
So there were Christians who found that very problematic.
The book says God created two lights,
and now science says one of them isn’t
in fact a light.
And what that does,
if we read this as literal science or literal history,
we find ourselves in the position of feeling the need to defend Genesis all the time.
We’re always trying to push back on how old the earth was,
what was invented first,
or what was evolved first,
or is there evolution?
What came first?
How did we get here?
We’re arguing all of those things defensively.
And when we do that,
if we allow ourselves to get drawn into those arguments consistently,
not that they’re not of interest,
but what they do is they change how we get the
book of Genesis, which came to us as a faith story.
A book from a people who looked at the world
and said,
“What has God done?
How has God been active?”
And they told stories to one another
about the place God had in their real experience
and in their real history and in their real
present and in their real future.
And if we miss all that in the process of feeling like Genesis
needs us to defend it,
then I think we do it a disservice,
and I don’t think we can hear it
as it was originally intended.
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.
And I want to just offer
a word of caution.
If one comes to this conversation and you find that
frame disconcerting,
I think we need to be clear and say that as we come to the book of Genesis,
we do so as those coming to Scripture.
We stand underneath Genesis as those who
come to a book that we have something
to be transformed by,
because in this book we encounter the living God, who ultimately
we see God reflected in Jesus Christ.
But as we come to the book of Genesis,
to say that it’s not helpful to try to flatten all of its bumps is not the same as saying to not take
it seriously or to not find it a substantial revelation of who God is.
It is to say that we
need to come to it with some humility to recognize that our frame of reference,
our own time in history,
our own basic assumptions about how science works and what play and claim science has
over our understanding of the world.
If we make the assumption that we are the universal and best
interpreters of the text,
we are going to fail to receive from the text the thing that it offers to
give us, which is a revelation of the God who was before all things,
the God who made all things,
and then the God who shockingly quickly has to fix the problem that the created ones make
with that beautiful and perfect creation.
That’s the sort of narrative of Genesis that we are very
quick to lose because it implicates us.
Instead of us being in a position of interpretive power,
if you let me say that,
if we’re the ones who are looking at it to prove it and defend it,
then ultimately we’re the ones who are least likely to receive the convicting note from it,
which is that implication that we too are involved in the breakdown and sinfulness of this good thing
that God made.
See, so if we allow ourselves to be in the story,
it suddenly has something to do for
us, devotionally, not just historically or scientifically.
So as we speak of it,
we don’t mean for it in any way to downplay the seriousness or substantial reality of the text.
No, in fact, I think in some ways it’s to emphasize it more.
And if you can bring that frame to it,
if you can bring some of that humility to it,
I think it radically shapes our way of viewing the text and
then ultimately how we’re going to engage with it as we study it and encounter its characters.
I think, unfortunately, we’ve been fascinated by the question
or the idea that Genesis is intended to tackle the question,
“How was it done?”
And really, it’s the question, “Why was it done?
Why did God do this?” Both in the case of the creation,
when we get to the flood story,
and when we get to the specific stories of the
patriarchy, the people that God calls into covenant,
the people that God essentially adopts
and claims as His own.
And the “how” question is not unimportant,
but I think if we treat it as the
primary question of the book,
we’re doomed to those kind of fruitless arguments about,
“Yes, it did.
No, it didn’t.” And I think we run the risk of missing the much deeper vein that runs
through this book, which is not only to share the promise of why God acted,
but who it is
that both created and claimed the world as good and unwilling to lose it even to itself as His
own.
And I think that will be the approach that we take.
And I think it’s a…
I would argue that it’s a deeper,
though not easier, way to read the book.
And there may be moments where those
assumptions come up, and you may have questions about them, and if so,
as always, drop that in the comment, shoot an email, give us a call.
We would be happy to continue to have those conversations.
But as we move through this,
on the front end,
I think it’s important…
Michael and I told you
long ago that we would try very hard not to get off script without telling you.
And so I want to
be sure that you understand this isn’t a book.
This isn’t a study in which we try to defend
the book of Genesis from history or science or anything else.
This is a book where we try to look
behind those, a study in which we try to look at this book behind those things and see what
truth might be hiding in those nooks and crannies.
So Clint, you’re better at this by nature of your
worldview.
Genesis is a narrative book about people.
It involves character after character after character,
and this ties into some of the things we’ve talked about in sermons recently,
about narrative sermon versus, you know,
a teaching sermon, that kind of thing.
And if you’re like me,
and you tend to view the world in a more structural kind of way,
if you think of the
world of systems and processes and, you know,
this is how this should work,
and that kind of thing,
that you may struggle to come to a book like Genesis and to see in it what is really on offer.
And this is one of those sort of introductory themes I expect that you’re going to see come up
in practical examples.
As we go throughout the book,
we’ll talk about Jacob,
and then we’ll talk
about how his name has significance,
and we’ll talk about how the family structure and how these relationships matter.
My point in saying this is quite simply,
one of the real temptations of coming to Genesis,
if you’re someone like me who thinks in those sort of really concrete ways,
is you love
the first part,
because the first couple chapters are like God doing things and making order,
and we get to sort of wonder how did it work and why did it work that way.
We try to sort of piece them
all together, but if that’s your bias,
you’re then going to struggle with literally the rest of the
book, which is all of these people who inherit
this sinfulness, and then they go forward and
they model for us within the first four chapters.
We have modeled the wrong way to live,
the way that this breakdown has entered into human relationships and stories,
and how this is being passed down from
family member to family member,
from generation to generation.
There’s a kind of beauty in Genesis
that lives in that kind of narrative tension.
It’s not fiction in the sort of literary sense,
but it’s character driven in a really truly scriptural
sense.
If you’re not used to a study
in that manner, and some of us are going to be less used to it than others,
this is actually a
great book.
It’s a great sort of primer on how to read scripture that is other people’s biographies
in many ways, and then to see God’s story written throughout them,
and I think it’s a good book to
study for that reason.
Yeah, allow me a brief detour if I can.
One of the things you learn
if you do any
counseling is that when people come in to a counselor, they’ll sometimes
tell their what is called their presenting story.
So what is it that brings you here?
Tell me
what’s happening, and they will choose a story,
and they will tell it.
And what the seasoned
counselor learns is that the story itself,
while not unimportant, is almost never the interesting
thing.
The interesting thing,
the question behind for the counselor is why did they pick that story?
Why did they tell me that thing?
Why is that the driving narrative that they chose in this moment
to share as an explanation?
And if you can do that with the book of Genesis,
if you can see the
story behind the story,
and we will do our best to help with that,
but that’s of interest.
Why did our people in faith,
why did they tell these stories?
Why did they tell them this way?
What did they mean to them?
Why are these the details that they wanted us to know and that they wanted
to share with us about this life-giving belief that they called God,
that they called Yahweh,
that they called Elohim,
that they turned to,
that they organized their life around,
that they believed gave them crops and raised the sun every morning and put the moon out every night.
Why did they tell us these things about those beliefs and about that holy one that they turned to?
And I think that’s,
for me, and I think once you’ve scratched the surface on that,
that’s what makes this book so incredible and amazing.
Not that it describes an ecosystem.
Yeah, okay,
that’s interesting, but that’s not what they were trying to do,
and I don’t think it’s what we should try to hear.
So I hope you will come to love this book.
It’s a fascinating,
almost,
it’s just a wonderful place to explore.
I think one of the really interesting temptations of a study like this
is the temptation to just run right into it, to go headlong,
chapter one,
verse one,
and there is some thought put into slowing a study like this down.
We’re not rushing into verse one,
chapter one, for some calculated reasons,
and part of that is because there’s something deeply meaningful
and purposeful about coming to the text and allowing ourselves to sort of clear out some
of the assumptions that we might bring to it so that we’re ready to hear the word.
And so I hope,
if this is your first conversation that you’ve joined us for,
I do hope that you would tune back
into the first one where we set out some of the sort of overarching scope of how we plan to handle it.
But for the, you know,
tomorrow,
and then as we get started next week,
I hope that you will help
us in sort of slowing down or not help us as much as come along with us as we do sort of slow down,
try to not rush into the thing,
but prepare ourselves so that we could hear it afresh,
see it in a new way.
I mean, that’s ultimately what we all aspire to with the holy text,
and I hope that’ll be your experience as well.
Yeah, probably tomorrow and Monday,
we will need to share with you some background.
There’ll be a little bit of scholarship.
I mean, we didn’t come up with it.
We borrow it from other people.
But there are some things,
some academic educational things that help,
I think, as we try to navigate Genesis.
And
if you’ll allow one loose analogy as we depart here,
if you simply showed up at the Grand Canyon,
you’d be impressed by it.
You’d see it.
You’d see the colors.
You’d see the depth.
You’d be amazed.
But if you did a little homework before you got there,
and you learned about erosion and
the soil and the strata,
and if you had some idea of what you were looking at,
it only adds to the awe and amazement you would feel.
And that’s why we have to start this way in Genesis.
Genesis is too,
it’s almost too important to just jump in without doing a little homework on the
end so that we know what we’re seeing and gives us a better chance to be aware and impressed by it, I think.
That’s well said.
Thanks for being with us here today,
friends.
We look forward to
seeing you tomorrow at two o’clock.
Have a great day, all.