In the Beginning God

Peter Voorhees

Genesis • Sermon • Submitted 4 months ago • Presented 4 months ago

0 ratings

· 2 views

As we begin our series in Genesis, it's vital we start with God at the center - the essence of life and foundation for living. Without recognizing God's primacy, we cannot align our lives accordingly. We must seek to understand the ancient perspectives rather than impose our modern ones, uncovering the deeper meanings God intends. The focus is on the purpose and function of creation rather than material origins. As we explore biblical concepts like "heavens" and "earth," we'll see how they culminate in Jesus, the beginning and end. Join us on this journey to grasp the richness of Genesis with God at the core.

Notes

Transcript

Introduction

In preparation for our series in the book of Genesis, I came face to face with many of the things that I have learned regarding the book of Genesis throughout the years.

I’ve spent time in the camp of folks like Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, who seeks to prove that God exists through scientific claims using Genesis. He is very demonstrative that if we “lose” Genesis to the secularists, then the Bible can not stand on its own.

I’ve read, though never found it compelling, those who see Genesis 1-9 as figurative and metaphorical.

And there are those who are somewhere in between.

There are those that see two creation narratives that seem contradictory in Genesis 1 and 2.

In all of this I want to suggest that often times we are asking the wrong questions when we approach the book of Genesis. Sometimes we are asking questions that Genesis is not answering.

Moses is the author of the book of Genesis. When he wrote this book (and the other first 4 books of the Bible) he was writing to an ancient people (commissioned by God), Hebrews/Israelites. Now because it is scripture, we know that it wasn’t written to us, but it was written for us. There is something in each of these pages that are for us to glean.

It is imperative that we learn to ask the right questions to uncover the depth and the intent of what God intended for us.

If we can grasp this idea, the richness and depth and the meaning of this book will unfold before us. I would suggest to you, if we start with our modern questions of science or how our understanding of the cosmos/universe works, we’ll miss so much of the richness that God intends. If we can put ourselves in the mind of the ANE follower of God, then I think our time together in this portion of scripture can be so much more profitable.

Illus: We run in different cultural waters. If you have travelled and lived anytime in another culture (foreign or domestic… Europe or deep south), you know that there is a different pace of life, priorities in what flourishing as people is like, do’s and don’ts, etc. It’s helpful to recognize the cultural soup we are living in.

Cultural examples: Individualism, consumerism, technological immersion, economic inequality, political polarization, racial reconciliation, mental health impacts, a globalized culture

Cultural examples in the 1200’s: the growth of gothic architecture, increased urbanization and growth of cities as economic and cultural centers, philosophy and theology coming together in the universities, growing tensions of the Christian Europe and Muslim East, metallic moveable type systems in China emerging, reform in the church (where church and government were closely tied together).

We have to mindful of the Ancient Near East person and what they would be thinking and understanding when looking at creation and reading Genesis. This will help us find some of the deeper meaning, that because we are removed culturally that we may have missed because we weren’t looking in the right places, or even asking the right questions.

So throughout our series you will hear Pastor Josh and I refer to the Ancient Near East (ANE) cosmology. This word means how does everything work. How does the cosmos (what we see and understand) come together. How does it work.

If we have time we’ll be able to talk about how there were multiple cosmologies in that day competing for the understanding of our universe and how everything fits. There was an Egyptian cosmology, a Babylonian cosmology, and so here comes God inspiring Moses to write down what the Israelites knew and passed down from generation to generation as to what they had been told… presumably by Adam and Eve.

To illustrate this point, John Walton (theologian) uses a helpful illustration… in being able to help us know if we are asking the right question.

Imagine that there was a play in the city that you were really interested in seeing but you thought I would be able to afford it. The tickets are expensive but then someone gives you tickets so you’re really excited so you head downtown to see this wonderful play but unfortunately there’s heavy traffic and there is some construction and there is an accident and the weather is bad and there one-way street and you can’t find parking and before you know it how you finally get to the theater and you’re a half hour late.

You take the bold step of poking the person next to you and say, “How did the play begin?” That person turning to and saying,

“Well the play was written in 1935. It was a pulitzer prize candidate that year and in fact was very popular in the stages of…”

You say, “Wait, wait, wait” you say, “That’s not the information I want.”

“Well you can’t have a play without a script” they say.

“I know, but…”

“OK, OK, the set was built by the Marsh construction company. They are very good at blackbox theaters and fitting the set to…”

“No no no that’s not what I asked you!”

“You can’t have a play without a set.”

“I know that, but…”

“OK, OK, the cast was chosen by the Johnson and Johnson Company who…”

“NO, I don’t wanna know about the cast.”

“Well, you asked how the play began. You can’t have a play without a cast.”

And finally in your frustration you say, “Will you please tell me what’s happened since the curtain opened.”

When we come to Genesis, it’s not seeking to answer our scientific questions that we have in our understanding of the cosmos. You’re going to read in Day one there is light, but the sun isn’t created until the fourth day. If we’re looking at this through our modern cultural lens, we’ll have difficulty and are forced to then start making caveats and reasons as to why this is.

If we take the Bible for what it is trying to say and seeking to understand who it is saying it to, I think we can have deep, significant, and applicable truth that will deeply impact our lives.

Yuri’s comment, C.S. Lewis retort, Dorthy Sayers

Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who, aboard the first successful crewed spaceflight, became the first human to journey into outer space. Travelling on Vostok 1, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961, with his flight taking 108 minutes. It’s said by some soviet sources have said that Gagarin commented during his space flight, "I don't see any God up here,"… this was then used often as a proof to promote atheism throughout the then Soviet Union.

CS Lewis, at that time wrote regarding this saying attributed to Gagarin that looking for God is not like someone on the first floor travelling up to the second floor to meet their neighbor. It is more likened to if Hamlet or Romeo would ever meet or know Shakespeare. If you read Shakespeare you will find Shakespeare on every page. However the only way that Hamlet will ever meet Shakespeare is if Shakespeare writes himself into the play for Hamlet to meet him.

Pastor Tim Keller on Dorothy Sayers: “Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of detective novels focused her fictional character Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers' creation Whimsey was an aristocrat detective from the 1930s who solved all kinds of crimes. She wrote a whole series of stories and novels about Lord Peter.

Then about halfway through her Wimsey detective series, a woman suddenly shows up in the novels. Sayers new character is named Harriet Vane, a female mystery writer and one of the very first women to get through Oxford. Harriet and Peter fall in love. Until that point in the series, Whimsey was an unhappy, broken bachelor, until Harriet Vane shows up and her love starts to heal his broken soul.

It's interesting because Dorothy Sayers, like her fictional creation, was one of the first women to graduated from Oxford. Like Harriet Vane, Dorothy Sayers was a writer of mystery novels. Dorothy Sayers looked at her character, Lord Peter Wimsey, and saw that he needed someone to help him out. So who did she put in there? A detective novelist, a woman, and one of the first women to go through Oxford. Who was that? She put herself into her own stories. She looked into the world that she had created and she fell in love with the chief character, Peter Wimsey, and she wrote herself into that story so she could heal him.”

In reading our Bible we unconsciously adapt the Bible to our cultural experience without even thinking about it. Within the last 100yrs the fist line of the Bible has created a lot of angst for Christians as we have read our own cultural experience into it.

What I want to do is recognize this that I unintentionally colonize the Bible with my modern cosmology and then I don’t know how to make sense of it. Then once I realize I am doing that, I try to make sense of it, but then view myself as superior to it because some how this is primitive and less sophisticated way of viewing the universe. This is the problem.

If you travelled to another country that you have never been to, you would expect differences and prepare as such to encounter those differences. Apply this idea to how we will understand our text. How can you engage this ancient text on its own terms as ancient and foreign text.

I have to seek to understand what they would have me understand and the reason it was written.

The Biblical authors seem to concern themselves more with the functions of things in the universe more than the material origin in how we conceive it in the modern world.

This will be helpful as we unpack the first verse of the Bible this morning.

If you are able and willing would you stand with me as I read God’s word to us this morning, Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

This is the word of the Lord. Let us pray.

You may be seated.

The Heaven’s and the Earth

Question: “Is it possible that our search for the truth of creation of Genesis 1 is misdirected if all we’re thinking about is the time and material processes of the universe’s origins, when what the biblical authors are trying to communicate through their sense of the universe is the meaning—the nature and purpose—of the world?”

Some of our introductions to the Christian faith was presented in a way that gave a clear meaning to the words “heaven” and “earth.” — “Earth” refers to the globe and the world as a whole. It is passing away, and Jesus has opened up a way for our sins to be forgiven so that we can go “heaven” after we die.

This scheme was introduced to me not just as a preparatory explanation for sharing the good news about Jesus, but actually as “the biblical” view of reality. Heaven was a post-mortem and spiritual dimension, a disembodied paradise of eternal life with God.

However, as I started reading the Bible, I came across many texts that used the words “heaven” and “earth” that not only challenged the previous “world picture,” but they began to point us towards a biblical story that is different than what might had been imagined.

“In the beginning” …

Now if you looked up the Hebrew word for beginning (I won’t say it here because our young people probably won’t hear anything else I say)… you will find that this word beginning is very much often used as a beginning point of a preliminary time as opposed to the first point in time. I would encourage you to look up all the uses of this word. Lot of free online resources to be able to do this.

God wanted us to start here. The first point… it begins with Him.

“God created the heavens and the Earth”…

For the ANE person, nothingness was anything that didn’t have purpose, order, or function.

We think of nothingness as immaterial. If something does not exist, it has no material or substance, it’s gone.

To the ANE person, in order for something to exist, it has to have function, purpose and order. (to understand this we need to jump from our cultural stream into theirs)

One way we might read Genesis 1:1 with that understanding is, “In the beginning, God gave purpose and meaning to the skies and earth.”

Notice in 1:1, “heavens” is plural. We naturally tend to translate this culturally… a post mortem other dimensional reality, eternal bliss… in this instance, it’s not the eternal bliss but the actual sky that they could see.

Earth is what we might imagine… the land that we live on. This will be important moving forward.

What we will begin to see that is that God is ordering all the things that we can perceive. Hint: we will find that everything will culminate in Jesus. That heaven and Earth will culminate and come together in Jesus. But that’s further down the road.

Here God is ordering everything. To the ANE person, it’s all that they perceive. Going outside in the middle of the day any time of year, or as they enter into the evening time… all that they perceive, God was at the center of it.

While I don’t want us to get distracted, I think it fascinating too that recently an astronaut sat down with Tim Mackie and Jon Collins with Bible Project and shared her observation of being in space and how space is a form of wild nothingness that wants to kill you. This will become more clear and palpable in the next weeks as we journey into each of the days of creation.

This book is so much more than what we can understand. Saying that though, there are very real and tangible things that we can walk away with that God intended for us to hold onto. This doesn’t require special knowledge to understand, but it is so deep that we will continue to study and uncover facets of truth that will cause us to worship and continue to compel us to offer our lives to the good, gracious, loving God who gave us life and sustains our lives.

Jesus Moment: What we see in the first verse is that God is at the center. To quote from pastor, author, theologian, the late Eugene Peterson, ““First, God: God is the essence of life and the foundation for living. Without recognizing the primacy of God, we cannot live right or align our lives accordingly. God should not be relegated to the sidelines, treated as an option, or reserved for weekends. Instead, God should be at the center and circumference of our existence – the beginning and end. God, God, God.”

God is the initiator, the sustainer, and one who holds it all together.

The late Chuck Smith, in going through the whole Bible with him in Bible College, I’ll never forget the first message I heard from him, in Genesis 1. “If you can believe the first line of the Bible, you should have no trouble with the rest of it.”

Conclusion

As we conclude, let's remember that Genesis was written for us, but not to us. We need to step back from our modern perspective and worldview to truly understand its meaning. When we ask the right questions, seeking the author's original intent, rich and deeper truths emerge that still speak today.

Rather than getting stuck in debates about material origins, let's focus on the functional purposes and theological meanings in the text that point to God's grand plan of redemption through Christ. Pay attention in the coming weeks for how it all seamlessly culminates in Jesus.

Keep this ancient perspective and cosmological worldview in mind as we go through Genesis together. Lay aside preconceived notions and be open to have long-held assumptions challenged. As we humble ourselves under God's word, I believe we will encounter the Living God and be shaped anew. Let's continue seeking Him with fresh eyes, pursuing truth on this journey.

I hope this gives you a desire to join us on this expedition through Genesis. Come with curiosity and hunger to understand the ancient word with modern meaning. God still speaks just as powerfully today through these ancient texts.