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You and You alone in all of creation are deserving of

our praise and of our worship and of our service, and it is

our joy this morning to open ourselves to You: to invite You,

our maker, the one who fashioned us, the one who fashioned all

things from nothing, to come now and instruct us. Teach us what

is true. Open up Your word to us and by Your spirit bring it to life and

bring us to life towards You. We pray in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

 

 

This morning we begin a new sermon series called “First Things” in which we will be developing a Biblical life view from the first two chapters of the Bible.

 

As followers of Christ, we believe that we have in these first two chapters of Scripture a reliable account of God’s original design for creation and for human life. Now, as Christians we tend to focus on the other 1,187 chapters in the Bible because those are the ones that describe the way that humanity fell away from God’s original design and the consequences of that fall and then the rescue that God set in motion as the solution to our spiritual dilemma.

 

But in this series we’re going to be zeroing in on the first two chapters of Genesis, on creation as God first purposed it, on the original design to learn what we can about:

 

• What is true about God.

• What is true about the world in which we live.

 

And, of special importance to us as we live in a world that has completely lost its understanding of what it means to be human:

 

• What is our truest essence as human beings?

• What distinguishes us from all other forms of animal life?

• What is our intended place in this world?

• And what is our intended place before God?

 

Those are the topics that we’ll be tackling in the weeks to come. But this morning, before we deal with the substance of this passage—with that which is at the heart of its message, I want to address some of the issues that, I think, can distract us from hearing what God is intending to say to us in this text.

 

So, today we’re going to be considering the question of how we are to interpret the first chapter of Genesis and how we are to understand Genesis Chapter one in the light of modern science.

 

Now, I understand that this is an emotionally charged bit of territory and some of you come out in different places than I do on these issues. I’m likely to offend some of you, to stretch most of you, and to confuse all of you at some point before the end of the morning.

 

Knowing that some of you will value being able to continue this conversation or raise a question or offer a different perspective on the text, we have arranged to have some pizzas delivered to the conference room right after the end of this service, and I will rendezvous there with anyone who is interested. I’d love to have you come and join me to discuss any aspect of this morning’s message that you wish, assuming I haven’t left you in a stupor of over-information.

 

So then, to the text. Please open with me to page one in your pew Bible, Genesis Chapter one, and listen to the authoritative word of God:

 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested [I think a better translation of that word is ceased] from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he ceased from all the work of creating that he had done.

 

So how are we to understand this passage? A straightforward reading of the text reveals a six-day creation sequence through which God brings all that is into existence.

 

And that, of course, stands in direct contradiction to the claims of science, which argue that the formation of the earth and its life forms was a process of gradual, or a series of sudden, changes which took place over millions of years.

 

Seemingly that leaves us with three choices: we hold on to the teaching of Scripture and discard the findings of science, or we hold fast to what science has taught us and throw out the Biblical account, or we try to find some way to harmonize the two accounts of creation into a single non-contradictory whole.

 

Certainly all three have been tried. Unfortunately, all three require significant compromise at some point. But I think there is a fourth option, and that is to allow the Scriptures to lead us in our understanding of what they do and do not say and then, having established that, to bring science in along side of that. I’d like to explore this approach with you.

 

Before we go any further, I think it is important that we stop and ask a crucial question: What does it mean for us as the people of God to interpret the Bible faithfully?

 

Here are three things that are a given for me when it comes to interpreting the Bible:

 

1. First, the Bible is God-breathed, inspired by God (II Timothy 3:16). God used human authors to faithfully record his perfect revealed word for his people.

 

2. Second, the inspiration of Scripture—the fact that it has come to us from God—is the basis for its authority. Because the Bible is inspired by God, it is fully trustworthy and without error in its teaching, and we can look to it with confidence to know what to believe and how to live. Psalm 33:4 communicates this.

 

These are convictions on which I will stake my life and my ministry, and which are among the most foundational beliefs of this church.

 

There’s another interpretive implication that spills out from our conviction that God inspired all of Scripture. It’s one that we don’t speak about as often, but one that I hope we consistently model in our teaching and preaching, and that is this: a third principle of interpreting the Scripture.

 

3. The way in which the Bible was inspired guides us in its interpretation. Because the Bible was inspired by God in a variety of literary forms which we call genres—types of literature such as letters, and psalms, and parables, and prophetic speech, and apocalyptic vision, we have a responsibility to make sure the way we are interpreting the Scripture is one that is faithful to those forms.

 

Now, that means it is not always faithful interpretation to interpret a passage literally. Instead, our understanding of the inspiration and the authority of Scripture requires that we take the Bible seriously.

 

In his exceptional book The Galileo Connection which I would really encourage you to pick up [about which I’ll speak more in a moment], Charles Hummel writes this:

 

“Frequently Christians are asked, ‘Do you take the Bible literally?’ The appropriate answer is ‘Sometimes. That depends on the kind of literature.’ One should take the literal parts literally and the figurative parts figuratively, aware that the biblical writers use a variety of literary forms to convey God’s truth. It is generally recognized that Scripture contains figures of speech. Yet many readers seem to ignore the wide differences among the Bible’s literary forms…. Major passages and entire books can belong to different genres; each must be interpreted in its own way.”

 

Now, let me give you an example of what I mean by interpreting Scripture in a way that is faithful to its literary styles.

 

If you tell me to break a leg before the curtain rises, or to knock ‘em dead before I give a speech, or to go jump in a lake after I have pulled a practical joke on you, and I literally do what you have told me to do, have I understood what you have said?

 

Well, it certainly shows that I have taken your words to heart, which is good, but it also shows that I have failed to understand the real intent of your heart, which is not so good.

 

Our interpreting the Bible needs to be governed by that same recognition.

 

Let me give you a couple of examples from the Scriptures.

 

The psalms sometimes use poetic language to capture the imagination, such as when God is compared to a hen that gathers its chicks under its wings when danger comes at six different places in the psalms, or when, in Psalm 104, God is described as riding through the sky in a chariot. We would be wrong to think that God is clad in feathers, or that He tools around in the heavens in a horse-drawn vehicle. Instead, these are intended to be pictures of God’s protection and of God’s power.

 

Parables often function as extended metaphors, in which one thing is compared to another thing. That doesn’t mean though that the two are identical; instead, it is meant to highlight one specific point of similarity that the author wants to bring to light. This guides us in our understanding of what he meant—and what he didn’t mean—when Jesus compares himself in John’s gospel to a loaf of bread at one point and to a gate on a sheep pen at another point.

 

And the bizarre imagery of apocalyptic language, such as we find in the Book of Revelation, is not meant to be taken literally. Instead, the authors use symbolic meanings to convey coded messages that we are meant to interpret using the Old Testament as our code book. This is the case, for instance, when we are told in Revelation 1:16 that Jesus has a sword for a tongue, meaning that his words reveal truth and they dispense judgment.

 

Faithful Biblical interpretation, taking the Scriptures seriously as being inspired by God and authoritative, requires that we take the text on its own terms.

 

Along these lines, I cannot recommend highly enough the book by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart called How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth in which two world class biblical scholars discuss the different types of literary forms found in the Bible and how most appropriately to interpret them.

 

So, with that interpretive principle in mind—that we have a responsibility to interpret the Scripture in a way that is faithful to its literary style, let’s look back at Genesis Chapter 1. Now, as we said, a first glance straightforward reading of the text reveals what seems to be a simple six-day creation sequence through which God brings all that is into existence.

 

But there is much, much more in this passage than meets the eye. Underneath this simple account is an exceedingly complex and carefully crafted structure. And there are two places that I want to point out where you can see this although there are many more.

 

The first that I just want to mention briefly is in the use of numbers that run through and give shape to this passage. For ancient Jewish writers, numbers were thought to have special significance.

 

Well when you take a closer look at the shape of Genesis Chapter 1, you see that the number three, which was understood by the Jews symbolically to represent God himself, impacts the story three times. There are three chaotic obstacles that God overcomes in his creative work; there are three pairs of creation days; and there are three times when the word “create” is used.

 

The number seven, the number that was understood to represent God bringing something to divine perfection, is also repeated. Seven times the text says “And it was so,” and seven times it reports that “God saw that it was good.” and, of course, there is the seventh and final day that gives structure to the passage.

 

The number ten also shapes the structure of the story and runs throughout it. That number symbolizes the idea of God bringing something to completion. Nothing is missing. Ten times we find the expression, “God said,” the expression “make,” and the expression “according to its own kind.”

 

Now, the second place where the complexity and artistry of this passage surfaces is in its structural framework. Let me show you what I mean by this.

 

God Creates

 

The passage begins by saying:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

In Hebrew, the words “formless and empty” are the words tohu and bohu. Tohu describes something that is unformed and bohu means something that is unfilled. And I can guarantee you that the authors intentionally had these two rhyming words in such a prominent place at the start of this text because they give a clue as how everything else unfolds. Tohu means unformed and bohu means unfilled.

 

Now let me show you what happens. First, in the initial three days of the sequence, God begins to give shape and form to the world that He has made.

 

God Creates

 

On the first day of creation, in verses 3-5, God creates light, and He separates it out from the darkness.

 

God Creates

 

On the second day, in verses 6-8, He separates the sky from the water.

 

God Creates

 

On the third day, which you find in verses 9-13, God isolates the land from the water, and then He furnishes it with vegetation of all kinds: grass, plants, and trees.

 

Now, what was once formless, without shape or structure, what was once tohu has been given order. Now, notice what happens starting with the fourth day of creation. God has created spaces; now God provides inhabitants for those spaces. Into that which was empty God now places occupants. He’s addressed the problem of its being tohu; now he addresses the problem of its being bohu.

 

God Creates

 

First, in verses 14-19, the sun and moon are placed in the sky as residents of the light and dark, their rays ruling over each of these realms.

 

God Creates

 

He then populates the realms of the sky and the sea in verses 20-23—the sky with birds and the waters with fish.

 

God Creates

 

Finally, in verses 24-31, he first fills the land with animals of every kind, both domestic and wild, and then, in His ultimate act of creation, He places humanity in the world. People have been arguing ever since whether or not that should be in the domestic or the wild category! Humanity is the occupant to live in and to rule over not just the land and the plants, but to rule over the whole of it. The world in all of its riches and beauty and perfection is God’s gift to the crown of His creation for man to care for and to enjoy.

 

God Creates

7. God Rules

 

And then finally on the seventh day, the day of God’s perfection, “the heavens and the earth having been completed in all their vast array,” God ceases from His work. On this Sabbath day He calls the crown of His creation, humanity, to cease its work, to turn from its rule over creation, and to bow to His rule.

 

This is the day that is to be set apart as holy, as consecrated for God: a portion of time devoted to God to remind us that all time is His, and that all creation is His, and that we are His, and that we find our rightful place under His rule. The creation account ends where it begins: with a claim to God’s mastery and His authority over the whole of creation and over us as his creatures.

 

Now, when we begin to see the structural complexity and artistry of Genesis Chapter one, we realize that it probably would best be described as poetic history. It does describe what is true, but it does so in what has clearly been given a poetic structure in much the same way that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” gives a decidedly poetic account of the very real, historical American Civil War.

 

So, while it uses chronology to give shape to the story, Genesis Chapter 1 is more about space than it is about time, describing, as it does, the way in which God brought shape and order and then occupants to that which was initially a chaotic existence.

 

I was first pointed to the structure of this passage through Hummel’s book The Galileo Connection in which he wrestles through this and other places of tension and conflict between faith and science. But Hummel wasn’t the one who discovered this in the last couple of decades. This pattern, this structure, for Genesis Chapter 1 was first noticed by Augustine all the way back in the fourth century. This is not some way of trying to get around the claims and discoveries of science and still somehow preserve the authority of the Scripture.

 

Interestingly, Augustine didn’t believe that this chapter described a six-day creation at all. Undistracted by literalism, by an insistence that this was six twenty-four hour days, he believed that the six days were about the order of the universe, not about the sequence in which it came into being, and lacking scientific evidence to the contrary, he believed that the whole of creation came about in an instant.

 

Now, though they didn’t notice the same structure, a number of Jewish scholars and other early Christian commentators took the same view of the unfolding week. It tended to be later that interpreters began to see Genesis 1 primarily as a literal description of a six-day sequence of events. And there have been others along the way over the ages who have tried to harmonize Genesis 1 with the prevailing scientific model of the day: first with Aristotelian physics, and then when that changed to try to reconcile it to Copernican physics, and then when that changed to try to reconcile it to Newtonian physics, and then when that changed to try to reconcile it now with Quantum physics—in each case with what, I believe, is probably only marginal success.

 

If Genesis 1 is not given to us to provide a scientific description of the first 168 hours of creation, then what is its purpose because its purpose should govern the answers that we derive from it? What is the question that this text is actually answering? I believe that there are two questions:

 

The first is: What is true about God, His relationship to creation, and His intention for humanity’s place within it?

 

And secondly, related to that: How does this differ from the beliefs of the other peoples who surround the people of God, first surrounded them in Egypt and now surround them in Canaan?

 

The story of creation that we are given in Genesis Chapter 1 has to be heard against the backdrop of other competing creation stories from which it stands in stark contrast. In Egyptian and Canaanite creation myths, multiple gods vie angrily for power and control. Parts of creation, especially the sun and the moon, are elevated and given divine status and worshipped as gods. Life’s events are understood to be ordered by the movement of the stars and the planets. And humanity is only created as an afterthought and as a result of an act of violence, one god against another.

 

The Biblical story could not be more different in its claims. It could not be more different. There is one God without rival. All of creation finds its source in Him and its meaning in its relationship to Him. He is the one who orders all of life’s events.

 

And humanity, far from an afterthought, is the pinnacle of His created work and the object of His loving affection. Ours is no parsimonious God. Rather, entrusting us with a world that is teeming with life, He is generous beyond our imagining in his provision for our need, lavishing upon us His love for us.

 

I believe that is the message of Genesis Chapter 1.

 

I’d like to conclude by taking just a few moments to tell you how I have come to answer the question of how the claims of Genesis Chapter 1 reconcile with the claims of science.

 

I share Galileo Galilei’s belief that God has given us two works of revelation: “one of nature, one of Scripture.” Francis Bacon calls them “the book of God’s words and the book of God’s works,” and as Galileo says, “The two truths can never contradict each other.” because they’re both the means by which God faithfully and truthfully reveals Himself. Now, this idea that there were two books of revelation was not new to Galileo. If you would flip a few pages ahead to Psalm 19, you would see there a poetic expression of this exact same idea: that God reveals Himself in creation and God reveals Himself in Scripture.

 

I also share Galileo’s belief that, as he said, “In discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experience and necessary demonstrations.”

 

You go to science to answer the questions that science answers and you go to the Scriptures to answer the questions that the Scriptures answer.

 

Scripture answers questions of who and why, questions of ultimate cause and ultimate purpose. Scripture is not concerned with questions of mechanical process.

 

Science, on the other hand, answers questions of how and when, questions of method and process. Science is not concerned with questions of ultimate intent.

 

The Bible was given to us to answer questions related to God, humanity, and the relationship that God intends to have with us as human beings. Recognizing the unique domain of Scripture’s concern, the church has come to speak of the Bible’s authority “in all matters of belief and conduct or life and practice.” We don’t have to insist that the Bible teaches scientific information in order to affirm its complete reliability and trustworthiness.

 

Now, interestingly, having said that, Christians have been at the forefront of scientific discovery from the very start. Christians invented the scientific method. Because of the Bible’s teaching about God’s ordering of creation, people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Pascal were all devoted followers of Christ who pursued science because they saw it as another form of revelation by which they could come to know and love God more deeply.

 

Think, for a moment, of some of the things of which we would have no knowledge were it not for science. How do we as Christians know that we live on a round planet? That the earth revolves around the sun? That matter is made up of atoms? That insects spread disease?  That air consists of various gases? That gravity is an attractive force between any two bodies? On and on and on could go the list of reliable discoveries that science has made over the ages. While it is true that science deals in the realm of hypothesis and some science is much more on the hypothetical realm than other science, it is also true that science is able to provide us with solid information about the world in which we live.

 

As to my own views about science and the way that science and Scripture and faith fit together, I want you to know that I seek to hold my view in a posture of theological modesty knowing that there are others who have studied the Scriptures far more deeply than I have and who have studied science far more deeply than I have, and they have arrived at different conclusions than the one at which I have arrived.

 

Having said that, let me share with you where I’ve come out.

 

When I first became a follower of Christ, based on my first straight-forward reading of Genesis, I believed that the Bible taught a literal six-day creation which I believe required belief in a young earth.

 

But over time I realized that this belief not only required me to throw out a lot of valid science, but it also seemed to required that I throw out a lot of valid Biblical interpretation, and it seemed to run roughshod over significant portions of Biblical text that I was taking as literal historical narrative but which, upon closer examination, suggested that they should not be understood in that way, that I wasn’t being attentive to what the literary form was that I was reading.

 

I believe that Genesis 1 is a true account of creation. But I believe that it is artistic and not literal. It is about the origin and the ordering of creation, in my opinion, and not about the sequence of creation and it answers the questions:

 

Where did everything come from?

Why is everything the way that it is?

What should we know about who we are as human beings and our place in this world?

 

I don’t believe that it is intended to answer the question:

 

How was the universe formed?

 

As to the age of the universe, I believe that we need to look to science to answer that question rather than to the Bible. And from what I’ve read, I believe that science has solid reasons to suggest that the universe was created in a moment in time somewhere between 13.7 and 14.6 billion years ago. The earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. Single-celled oxygen-based life was created 1.8 billion years ago. Plant and animal life were created about 480 million years ago. Dinosaurs came on the scene with other mammals around 210 million years ago and were swept away when a massive meteor that is known as Chicxulub struck the Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago.

 

More recently there have appeared on the scene a series of human-like species at the end of which God created a single man and a single woman and began a distinctly human species fashioned in His own image somewhere between 30,000 years ago, when the first art and complex tools were created, and 10,000 years ago, when we know that the first agriculture, domestication of animals, creation of pottery and woven goods, forming of villages, and creating of religious figurines happened.

 

As to evolution, it depends on what you mean. I do believe that the evidence is compelling that there has been a development of species from less complex to more complex over time, and that this is borne out not only by the fossil record and carbon dating but also by genetics.

 

However, I do not believe in an independent force or natural law that operates without God’s superintending hand and creative power. I am persuaded that natural laws are simply ways of describing God’s consistent way of sustaining and ordering and working within the created order. From my perspective, evolution is a descriptive word for life change, but it is not an explanatory mechanism for the arrival of life itself.

 

Now, again let me say, while I have become persuaded of these things, I may well be wrong, and I don’t believe it is necessary for you to agree with me on things such as the age of the earth or evidence for species change over time in order for you to be a faithful follower of Christ. These are secondary matters; they are not central features of the faith. And please hear me when I say I do not believe that they are central features of the message of Genesis Chapter 1. They are secondary aspects.

 

Those issues are not what this passage is about. As we close, let me bring us back again to what, I believe, is the central teaching of this passage which is of non-negotiable and primary importance for every human being to wrestle with and to consider and to submit to. These are of primary importance to us as the people of God. And these are the matters that we will be exploring in depth over the next two months placing ourselves under the truth of them.

 

As the psalmist says:

 

“The Lord merely spoke, and the heavens were created. He breathed the word, and all the stars were born. Let everyone in the world fear the Lord, and let everyone stand in awe of him. For when he spoke, the world began! It appeared at his command.”

 

This passage teaches us that there is one God, without rival or peer, who created everything: the heavens and earth. All of creation finds its source in Him and its meaning only in its relation to Him. God has perfectly ordered and richly supplied all things. He is generous beyond our imagining, and He has provided lavishly for our every need.

 

We, as human beings, are the pinnacle of God’s creative work. We differ from all human life in that we alone were created in the very image of God. In love He has placed us in a position of power and rule over all of creation even as we find our rightful place under God’s holy rule of us.

 

He is the Lord of all creation to whom alone be all glory and honor and praise.

From age to age, from everlasting to everlasting, He reigns!

 

Amen.