Sermon Tone Analysis
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Good morning.
This weekend is sometimes called the first weekend of summer, so witht hat being said we will kick off a new sermon series.The series is called “It All Starts Here”.
In it we will be looking at the book of Genesis.
Let us Pray
Read Gen1:1-5
Bereshith.
Bara Elohim.
In the beginning God.
-3 Hebrew Words.
Bereshith Bara Elohim- They mean In the beginning God.
That is the very beginning of the Bible.
In the Beginning-God.
Why the Creation Account?
Bereshith Bara Elohim-Now let the controversies begin.
Open the floodgates.
Start the discussions Logic reason spirituality, faith, they all collide.
Right there with 3 words Bereshith Bara Elohim.
In the beginning God.
I remember being in College and laying on the hood of my friends car on a particularly beautiful summer evening in the Iowa countryside and staring up at the night sky and seeing millions of stars and wondering.
How far does it go?
How many stars are there.
Where did it all begin?
When?
How?
Of course I am not the only one who had those thoughts.
I am sure many of you did if not all of you.
The late Stephen Hawking banked on the fact that everyone thinks about such things.
He wrote a book that became a best seller because so many people think about the origin of the universe.
It was called a “Brief History of Time”.
Maybe you read it.
It explained in layman’s terms how the universe began.
It explains the Big Bang Theory.
Do you know what that is?
In it’s simplest terms astronomers, and physicists see that stars are traveling away from us.
So they back things up and do the math and come to the conclusion that the entire universe started a very long time ago, in fact they can calculate it.
When all of the matter, all of the energy, everything was compressed into a small single point they call the singularity and then it exploded and began expanding ever since.
We are now riding the wave of the explosion.
The problem is and one Steven Hawking was working on until the day of his death was what happened before the big bang.
How did all the stuff in the point that exploded get there, where did it come from?
Bereshith Bara Elohim-In the beginning God.
Stephen Hawking is not the first to come up with a theory of how the universe began.
He isn’t the only one, many many scientists have worked on and contributed to theories on the origins of the Universe.I’m sure many of you here know in far greater detail than I do about the Big Bang theory.
As 21st century people we live in a world that is filled with books explaining life, and how it evolved, and the universe and where it came from.
There are programs on educational TV about such things and you go through school and learn from Science textbooks about the origin of life.
And the whole process of how life on this planet came to be.
Sometimes Christians may feel like there many different theories being recognized, and taught and pushed in the media and in schools.
We may feel that everywhere we turn there is talk of all these theories about how the universe came to be.
This may sound strange, but I don’t think we are the first people group to feel this way.
I tell you why.
When we handle the Bible, we talk about how it is God’s word, and it is.
It is without error in the original manuscripts it is breathed out by God.
Every single word in it is God’s truth, it is infallible.
When we attempt to find out what the Bible means for us, we have to remember that the Bible was written infallibly, without error breathed out by God, to a specific people at a specific time.
We try and understand what the text meant to them, and then we can apply it to our lives.
What was God saying to them, and we then see what God is saying to us.
Genesis was breathed out by God to the Nation of Israel through Moses.
This happened during the time of the Exodus.
The Nation of Israel had just been led out of Egypt, by a god, that perhaps they did not know very well.
It is quite possible that they looked out over the desert at night and looked way up in the night sky.
They could see millions of stars, and they probably wondered.
Where did all this come from?
How did it get here?
Why?
They might have had theories.
Not our scientific theories, but theories from the other nearby civilizations.
The Babylonians had a story.
The Egyptians had a story.
Other ancient people groups that existed at that time had there own stories of how the universe came into existence.
Certainly as we look at those ancient stories we think they are ridiculous and foolish.
Some contain monsters, others have gods doing battle, others have gods giving birth to the universe, some have their gods as the universe.
All those stories were swirling around the common culture of the Hebrew people.
The Hebrews certainly knew those stories.
And so it was quite possible that as they lay down at night in the Sinai desert that they ask questions, and wonder where did it all come from?
So as they wondered, God gave to Moses the Book of Genesis, containing the creation account.
God was out of his great mercy, out of his grace, revealed Himself to the the Hebrew people.
Almost as if it was a personal answer to their questions, through scripture.
God creates uniquely
The creation narrative contained in Genesis is quite different than all the other stories of creation.
The creation account in Genesis has some striking differences from all those other creation accounts.
And interestingly it is not just those ancient myths either.
The creation account in Genesis has noticeable differences in the modern scientific theories as well, and that it seems is what cause the problems.
So we open the text, and read Bereshith Bara Elohim.
In the Beginning God created.
Ex-Nihilio
Bara means created.
It is a singular verb it means to create.
It is only used of God, there is a different word when you and I create.
We make.
Elohim-creates, there is a difference.
He calls to existence that which was not.
He creates ex-nihilo- as later Theolgians would say.
Elohim creates out of nothing.
Everyone else just rearranges that which already is.
SO, what we have in that first 3 three words of the first verse of the Bible puts to odds, every single tale story fable and scientific theory ever put forward.
Bereshith Bara Elohim.
at some point when God decided that we should enter the story God, the all powerful God, the God that seperate and apar from the universe he created created the universe out of nothing.
The heavens and the earth, all that we know or see, and that which we do not know and cannot see.
This is different than all the other stories the Hebrews have encountered.
They heard of Gods giving birth, thus the universe being a part of the God.
Or universes that self-create or universes that is God.
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