In the Beginning

 Read Genesis 1

So we begin בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית ba re sit or how the Hebrew people addressed this account.

We begin our journey through Genesis without a long introduction.  I will talk about its authorship and composition as we venture through this study that will take a year.  Don’t punch out on me.  It will be a good trip.

We begin our journey through Genesis with a thought that we cannot understand as a finite beings.  What thought?

In the beginning…

We cannot truly comprehend the beginning.  For us, there was always something beforehand.

We have been to the beginning of a baseball game, but there was travel for the teams, umpires had to arrive, the dirt of the infield had to be watered, especially in western Oklahoma and so many other things had to happen before the game could begin.

Before that the field had to be built, the game of baseball had to be invented, and someone had to learn how to market hot dogs and popcorn and five times the going price.

Something always came before.

Think to your governor or senator or county commissioner.  Their election was not the beginning.  His time or her time as governor might have begun on a specific date, but much occurred before. There was a campaign, there was a decision to run, there was fundraising, there were boring speeches to be made, and so much more.

Genesis begins, in the beginning.  This is before humanity existed and before human consciousness.  It was at the beginning to which we cannot find antecedent.

But there was that which preceded the beginning. There was God and God created all that we know, and surely much that we have yet to know.

What did God create first?

Evidently, God created the elements for heaven and earth as we are told the earth was formless.  It was a lump of divine Playdough, but God was there and the Spirit of God was there and if we jump all the way to John’s gospel, we see that Jesus the Son was there. And if we think about both accounts, it seems that Jesus had to do most of the work.

Where did God start?  He began with the heavens and the earth and it appears there was plenty of water to work with.

He began with light.  He separated the light from darkness, which means that initially there was darkness, just darkness.  The default setting for this cosmic playdough was darkness.  God specifically made light. Light will continue to be a big concept throughout God’s relationship with humankind, which at this point had not yet been created.

We don’t see the dark called bad, but the light is good.  There is some food for thought as we consider future analogies and metaphors in our biblical studies.

Is this important?  It gives us the sequence for the first day.  Darkness then light. There was darkness then there was light making the first day.

I mentioned before that there must have been a lot of water, so on the second day, God separated the water into two big parts.  There was water that would be on the earth and water that would be above the sky.  To do this God created an expanse, a firmament, a sky that would separate the waters.

Then he called it a day, the second day.

The third day was a busy day.  God separated the waters on earth by land. Then he began with the vegetation—plants and trees.  God created life.  It was plant life but it came with the ability to propagate itself.  We’re talking seeds.

Within the first life on this planet was the ability to create new life.  That’s a very intricate design. Day and night, water and sky, land and water, and everything required to make a planet were very impressive, but now life.  That’s big time even when everything that has come before is big time.

Life and the ability to continue life in the time to come were upon the earth.  It is at this point that God begins declaring his creation to be good.

On day 4 God populated the sky with lights.  There were two main ones for us.  The sun would govern the day and the moon the night.  It is at this point you might have to wrestle with the chronology of creation.

If the sun wasn’t onboard until day 4, where did the day 1 light come from?  It came from God, of course.  God said, let there be light.  On day 4 we see what we saw from the beginning.  God gave form to the formless.

Instead of thinking that there could be no light without the sun and the moon, consider that God gave form to light.  Some went to the sun and would be reflected by the moon.  Much was distributed throughout the universe.

It was not a random scattering.  The lights in the sky enable us to define seasons and even sacred times.  Some of those sacred times might later be part of God’s feasts that he told his people of, once humankind progressed that far.

A sacred time might be a single star to appear at a specific time that would lead wise men to Jerusalem to witness that the Messiah had been born.  All of this was put into place before human flesh was created on the earth and  from the earth as we will see in chapter 2.

God called it a day and declared it to be good.

Day 5 was fish and wildlife day.  God stocked ponds and oceans and commanded these aquatic creatures to multiply.  He had to create these creatures first, then stock the ponds.

And he didn’t forget the birds either.  God created birds. That was day 5.

So, there’s life in the air and life in the seas, and you guessed it, day 6 is about life on the land. So, God created livestock—cattle—as well as wild beasts.  He made things that would creep and slither on the ground. 

Most of you are too young to know who Ian Anderson is.  He is the main lyricist and flute player for Jethro Tull, and I’m not talking about the guy that perfected the horse-drawn seed drill.

In one of his songs, Bungle in the Jungle, he penned the line:

He who made kittens put snakes in the grass.

But as you will see during the day and at the end of the day, God called it all good, but we are not quite there yet.  God had something big that he saved for last.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,

    in the image of God he created them;

    male and female he created them.

As God created fish and birds and animals and insects and even snakes there were some governing words attached, according to their own kind.  These creatures were segregated by genus and species if we want to venture into the modern vernacular.

They were put into families that would not breed with other families.  God designed each of these creatures to make more creatures like it, but not to mix the DNA outside of the family.

When it was time to make man, God said that he would make humankind in his image.  Humankind would rule over the other lifeforms on the planet.  We will get to the story of God making Adam out of the earth, but here we see that we are designed to be like God and not like the creatures he gave us to rule over.

God also gave humankind special instructions.

·       Increase, multiply, propagate—ok, those were not unique.  Every living thing was to do that. God told humankind to do it until the earth was filled.

·       Subdue the earth.  What’s that mean?  Bring it under your control and manage it.  From the beginning, we were entrusted with the earth.  We have stewardship over the earth. We are trusted with the earth. I think that we could have done a better job with this trust based on the Walmart bags that we have scattered all over creation.

·       God also gave us a diet.  It appears that we started out as vegetarians, though he did create livestock from the beginning.  Over the ages, the divinely prescribed diet would change for various reasons, but it looks like we began as vegetarians. One of those reasons would be for God to separate a people for himself and then to reconcile all things to him.  Yes, there is a lot going on here in these first days.

God looked over what he had done and declared it good.

Before we go to chapter 2, let’s understand a basic framework.  This is not a science book, but science should agree with what we find here.

If it were a science book, it would fill the Library of Congress, and that’s in 8-font print.  It’s a window to understanding creation. What could possibly be more important than understanding?  How about trust.

What does it mean that science should agree with this creation account?  There is no time frame attached to what happened before God spoke everything into existence. Only by those things created can we measure what we call time.

There is no list of kingdoms and phyla and other classifications for the life bestowed upon the earth, but all life came only from God.

When science announces a discovery, it should be in accord with what we know about creation through this account or we should expect this new evidence to be dismissed at some point. The latter may not happen in our lifetimes. We may have to contend with all sorts of theories that the world accepts at face value.

Revisions in scientific knowledge are expected.  That’s the nature of science. Let the world search and research.  Let scientists challenge this biblical account and search some more.

Humans have a desire for this—inquiring minds want to know, but understand any true discoveries will be consistent with the creation account that we have.  We who live by faith simply wait for science to catch up with what God has revealed to us.

We truly walk by faith not by sight in this matter.  We were not there.  Neither were the scientists.  The scientific method is a good thing.  It questions. It experiments. It repeats experiments, It extrapolates.  It theorizes, but in the end, it is a best guess when it comes to creation.

Good science may fill in some details where we only have a big-picture account, but those details must be in accordance with that divinely inspired account.

The creation story in Genesis is a faith statement.  Faith about what?

·       God created the universe

·       Everything that God created, he created good

·       God designed life to begat life according to its kind

·       We are made in God’s image

·       God trusted us with the creation

That’s what we should understand so far. As we study Genesis, we must take into account the full biblical witness.  We must never lose sight of these things.

·       God loves you

·       God has good plans for you

·       Salvation and the fulness of life are in Christ Jesus

As we try to grow in understanding, remember that trust in the Lord is more important than our own understanding.  We cannot fully comprehend the thoughts and ways of God, but we are given the mind of Christ.

Some would say that we cannot understand the New Testament without understanding the Old Testament.  Understanding the Old Testament may be necessary to understand much about God as revealed in the New Testament, but it is not sufficient. We are blessed to have the New Testament through which we may also understand the Old Testament better and to help us understand more about a God not confined to linear time.

We need the full biblical witness to truly be a workman approved as we handle the word of God.  Let’s study the beginning without losing sight of what we already know so well.

·       God loves us

·       God is love

·       I am saved by grace through faith

·       I am a new creation whom God has liberated from sin and death

·       I am to be a light unto the world

·       We are to be known as disciples of Christ Jesus by our love

·       We are commissioned to take God’s love to the world

·       We are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling—as the most important thing we do in response to God’s grace

The list could go on, but what I ask of you is not to lose sight of who you are and what God created you to do now—in this time—even as we study the beginning of all that we know.

So, it’s on to Genesis 2 next week.

Amen.