"In the Beginning"

Biblical Theology and the Big Picture of Genesis

My intention is to move at a faster pace through Genesis, not because we want to skip content or read lightly. I hope to go rather deep, but I hope to consider the forest more than the trees and therein to read for biblical theology as opposed to inch by inch or verse by verse.

We want to see the larger themes of Genesis and how they correspond to all of God's Revelation. And so I kind of feel if you've ever seen, I don't think it's been on air now for probably a decade or two.

If you ever seen shop till you drop, that game show where at the very end, the contestants have this cart that's empty and they have a whole grocery store in front of them, but they only have a minute or two to run around and get all the expensive, wonderful items in their cart.

And if you make enough money with what you've put in your cart, then you win that episode. And I sort of feel like that in front of Genesis. Genesis is this huge grocery store and I have these 45 minute Lord willing segments each Sunday to try to fill up all the riches that I can.

And there's going to be a lot that I pass by for that very reason. Some of you might say, Oh, the caviar, the caviar over here, the champagne over here. And I'm grabbing baloney and other things as I go.

I'm going to miss things. It's the nature of looking at a forest more than the tree, but I hope that you'll be encouraged to integrate your own study and your own examination of the passages we look at.

Maybe spend more time during the week over the things that we didn't cover, but keep in mind how this all integrates into the larger themes that we're painting and everything is really nestled in close.

The first three chapters are incredibly rich, perhaps the richest in all of scripture.

It's impossible to do justice to it.

So today we're just taking a little chisel and standing on top of the iceberg of the depth of the majesty of God's word and trying somehow to glean some of the glory of what we're going to consider together.

As we mentioned last week, Genesis is the foundation for all of scripture. No Genesis, no redemption, no Genesis, no gospel, no Genesis, no history, no origin, no cosmology, no universe, no meaning. Genesis is the foundation for all that is very significant that we understand.

As I mentioned last week, the foundation determines the shape and the extent of what's built upon.

It.

The foundation for a building determines how much you can build and what the shape decides. The weight capacity of what you build will look like, and so it is with the book of Genesis. It's the foundation for all of scripture.

It's the foundation for all of redemption, the foundation of the gospel itself. There is more of the gospel in Genesis 1 -3 than I suspect anyone in this room imagines, including me.

It's incredibly rich, incredibly rich.

So we're not going verse by verse. We're looking for the big picture. And this morning we're really just, even though I've said we're moving thematically, really just looking at one and a half verses today.

And we're going to look at that in two parts. In the beginning, God created, and in the beginning, God blessed. These are the two anchors for our time this morning. In the beginning, God created, and in the beginning, God blessed.

Next week, we'll still be in chapter one, looking at verses 26 and following. So you'll notice today, we don't spend much time talking about the creation of man. We don't spend much time looking at humanity because it would be impossible to do justice to it in one sermon dealing with other things.

Creation as Divine Fiat, Not Process

So in the beginning, God created. Just to say creation already assumes something, doesn't it? Just to say creation implies a creator. And when you say creation and imply a creator, you're talking about the purpose and the intention or design in the act of creating.

This is opposed to the myth of macroevolution. And yes, it's a myth. Evolutionists like to claim that creationists have mythological views of the origins of man. And I would say, no, they have a mythological view of the origin of man.

That requires far more faith and religious, you know, fantastic religious faith in order to embrace macroevolution. You'll notice that prefix macro because, of course, there is some truth to the idea of microevolution.

Species change over time through certain mutations and traits as a part of how God has designed. But wide-scale macroevolution in terms of interspecies mutation, that we flatly reject. This is opposed, again, this idea of macroevolution is opposed to what God has declared in his word here in Genesis 1.

And as I said, it requires tremendous religious fanaticism to hold to macroevolution, to hold to a blank, churning process that requires billions of years, and that at the end of the day, philosophically, cannot get past the conundrum of something coming out of nothing.

There's an expanse of nothingness, although if it was nothingness, it wouldn't be an expanse, but you get the idea. We can't even conceptualize nothingness without trying to put it into a space. The evolutionist has to have enough faith to believe that blind nothingness can produce a single atom.

Christians have a far more reasonable view of the origins of man and the origins of all that is. It's not because the Enlightenment finally made us that much smarter. We haven't found any atheist tribes in the history of human civilization.

I think it's because ancient people were a little more bright than some of our modern-day counterparts. Something cannot come out of nothing. Theology without creationism then has to create a god for itself.

Whether or not they claim to have a god, they have a god, even if that god is the blind sense of process. To turn from the claims of Genesis 1 is to turn from the god of Scripture, who acts according to his word, according to his will, the personal god, Yahweh, to a god of your own devising, a god that's aloof, a god that winds up the watch and leaves it to unwind itself.

What we believe as Christians is that God has created according to a divine will in.

Divine acts.

The word we often use is fiat, not the little Italian motor car, but fiat, which is Latin, let there be, from the Vulgate, let there be. This is how God has created divine acts that were spoken, and John takes this up as we'll see a little bit more next week.

John begins his gospel in the same way Genesis 1 begins. In the beginning was the word, the fiat of God, the agency of creation, Christ himself. There's no process to God's act in this sense. Those who try to merge Darwinism with creationism end up failing both views because they're entirely incompatible from top to bottom.

As one said, a strong, faithful belief in creation by the triune God, we'll talk more about the trinity in creation next week too. Again, skipping that grocery aisle today, unfortunately. A strong and faithful belief in creation by the triune God will regard all powers other than this God or scripture as derivative, limited, totally circumscribed by God's decree.

All that is, is from God according to his degree and will and therefore all power, all claims, all purposes, all functions are derived from God's will. This is really Rush Dooney, who I don't agree with on a whole lot, but I think he's got a lot going for him here.

And what he wants to connect is the idea of Darwinian progress to some of the revolutions that we see even in our own day, even culturally today, the turmoil. This is what happens when you have a worldview that's composed by blind chance and exerting raw power over the blind forces of nature.

The idea is process becomes progress. Since there's no creator outside of the cosmos, there's no purpose within the cosmos and therefore all power within the cosmos is available for those who are willing to grasp it.

Chaos reigns, not divine order, but blind chance. Stability and hope are not founded in God, but in those who make their own way in the world and they abuse, therefore, what they reject as the good design of God.

Process becomes progress. Darwinian evolution has no stable standard. It has no governing morality, though they always have to appeal to a governing morality. It's simply a religious embrace of process.

And the sad history of this view in all of its varied forms is that it turns inward instead of outward, downward instead of upward. In short, it is man-centered instead of God-centered. But just because it's man-centered doesn't mean it's good for man, because when men become man-centered instead of God-centered, they end up dehumanizing other humans.

If you want to know how to preserve life and justice, light and liberty, you must have God at the center of it all. If you make man, implicitly yourself, the center, you will tyrannize and dehumanize all others.

Process becomes progress. Invariably, this devolves into an abuse, in a dehumanizing decline, the idea of progress built on godless humanism. I thought I was getting the hook to show time at the Apollo.

The idea of progress built on godless humanism is the most dehumanizing idea possible, because humans were made by God, for God, and therefore can only find their meaning, purpose, and flourishing in the purposes of God.

Now, all of that to one side. This is not to say that creationists themselves, us-selves, if that's a word, creationists, us-selves, struggle with astronomical, biophysical, geological data. That's not plain to all, even at the strictest 6 -24 hour day levels.

There are debates, disagreements, models that work and fail as different experimentation goes on. There's no one scientific model that can explain all of the data, and of course, as I explained last week, we shouldn't read Genesis in terms of modern methods and models of scientific inquiry to begin with anyway.

But we know it will always comport with what God has revealed in nature. So I agree, I don't agree with his view on a lot of human origin stuff, but I agree with this statement from the Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner.

When the revealed and the observed seem hard to combine. Here's what God has revealed in the book of Scripture, here's what we observe in the book of nature. When these things seem hard to combine, it is because we know too little, not too much.

There's always a higher synthesis that's compatible for both. This is the nature of scientific inquiry to begin with. Those who claim, I don't believe in faith or religion, claim in science, first of all, they have more faith than we do in their own worldview.

Second of all, they don't understand the nature of scientific inquiry. I won't go into the details, but to make a long story short, the idea of scientific inquiry is to have a falsifiable theory. You're looking for a working model until more data comes in to disprove the temporary hypothesis that you created.

There is no standard, no objective universal standard, it's just not the nature of doing science. So when they claim, I believe in science, they're actually viewing it as a religious faith. And they're treating it as though it has all this authority over against certain religious understandings, when in fact it is a far more extremist religious faith.

The idea, again, that we know too little, not too much, just to give a quick example in the history of physics. It was once widely universally accepted that Newtonian physics could not be overthrown. Until a guy named Albert Einstein came along, and then we went into Einsteinian physics.

Now we finally grasped it, here's something incontrovertible. Until we moved to quantum theory, and now we have quantum physics. You see the point. Things that are universally accepted because of the nature of scientific inquiry get overturned.

It's not because we know too little, sorry, too much, it's because we know too little. Scientific inquiry versus revelation in scripture, in the words of Derek Kidner, could be compared to two different accounts of the same subject.

One, perhaps scripture, would be the artist's portrait. The other would be an anatomist's diagram. Both reveal true information according to different methods to different ends. For the Christian, it must be that these are ultimately compatible, that they form a synthesis, because they're unified by the one creator, God, in the single historical act of creation.

But we must remember that there are different methods and different forms of verification. I realize there's a lot of jargon, we're moving into smoother waters in a moment. But here's a point I really want to make about all this.

And I think this is important for you, especially you homeschooling children, who are learning how to sharpen your swords and your arrows, in terms of creationist apologetics, and Godspeed to you. But let's always keep in the back of our minds, whenever we're sharing our faith, whether we're defending creation or any other part of God's revelation, we have to remember this, natural man, by the fall, has an innate desire to repress their knowledge of God, Romans 1.

Though it's evident to them, they must repress it. They're in high rebellion against their creator. They're not waiting for the magical argument, or that one link to a YouTube video, that's finally going to win them over.

They'll do that, because maybe God will use it. But the point I'm trying to make is, we don't reason people into the kingdom, in the same way that we're not reasoned into the kingdom, it's a divine act of God.

That implicit desire to repress the plain knowledge of God means that, in order to believe, you must become a creationist. In order to be a creationist, you must believe. I'll say that again. In order to be a creationist, you must believe.

And in order to believe, you must be a creationist. There's really no way around that. You must have faith to understand. Augustine, ironically, not a creationist in our best sense, though he was about 2 ,000 years old, Augustine said this helpful truth, I believe that I may understand.

That's how a Christian views the difficulties of creation. Let me prove the point with Scripture. Hebrews 11, 3. By faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, and the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

Do you notice what the writer of the Hebrews says? By faith, we understand that God made all that is, whether seen or unseen. By faith, we understand this. This is not a response to Darwin because it was written 2 ,000 years ago.

So we come to our text, perhaps the three most famous words in all of the Bible and all of human communication, in the beginning.

In the beginning, God.

Two words in Hebrew, In the beginning, God created. One of the most striking features of Genesis 1 is how God-centered it is. If I'm remembering how many times I counted last night, 35. Within a span of about 30 verses, 35 times.

God is the center of the beginning of this prologue to Genesis. He's mentioned throughout the chapter constantly. Notice, creation has a beginning, but God does not. Creation begins with an account of its origins, but we have no origin or account of God.

That's significant because the literature of the time, in the ancient Near East, their gods had origin stories. What they were formed out of. Not the God of the Scriptures. This God has no beginning, no origin.

He is the one who creates all that is, while remaining outside of it. Creation has a beginning, but God does not. Time and space have a beginning, but God does not. Energy and matter have a beginning, but God does not.

All of these things that compose our physical reality were created by God. God is the great I am. Uncreated, not I was, once was, will be, became. But no, I am. That's the great revelation of who He is.

The most important feature of Genesis 1 -1, in light of what follows, is that fact. God is. Therefore, God is not any part of what He's made. He's entirely other than His creation. God does not come from anyone or anything.

He has no genealogy, no lineage, no transmission. He simply is. The eternally unbegotten, unchanging God. In the beginning, this God created. When we say that God creates, we're saying something utterly exclusive to God.

We use the word create in the English language as a synonym for other words like make, fashion, shape, form, and so on. Hebrew has those words too. But Hebrew does not use the verb create synonymously with these other words.

It reserves the verb create for God alone. In the Hebrew Bible, God is the one who creates. Mankind only forms, shapes, and makes out of what God creates. Do you see how even the language itself reinforces the fact that God is not a part of His creation?

He is the creator of all that is, and all we can do is appropriate and fashion out of what the creator has created. In the ultimate sense of the word, only God creates. I like to think of myself as a creative type.

I'm a creative type. I appreciate the finer details. And as I've been looking at this, I have to remind myself, really only God is the creator. I just appropriate. I bite His style, so to speak. We read this morning as we open the service.

By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap. He lays up the deep in the storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord.

Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him, for He spoke and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast. You see, the power of this God, He creates with absolutely no expense of effort.

He doesn't have a bead of sweat on His invisible brow, to use anthropomorphic language. He exerts nothing of Himself. He remains constant. God, as creator, assigns to everything a value and a place. What we read in this chapter, He separates.

He divides.

He brings order to the cosmos that was without form and void. Now, structurally, when you look at the days of creation, that's a very important point. Notice what we have in our opening verse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void.

Those two descriptions, without form and void or empty, form the structure of the days that followed. Literarily, of course, what I'm saying is there's a parallel structure of the days. Day 1, light and dark.

Day 2, sea and sky. Day 3, the earth and the earth being made fruitful. Day 4, the lights of the day and the night, the luminaries. Day 5, creatures of the water, creatures of the air. Day 6, creatures of the land.

Now, we tend to read that in a linear way, which is one of the ways you have to read it. But there is this parallel structure between the first three days and the second three days. If you were to line up the first three days next to the second set of three days, so day 1 and 4 correspond, 2 and 5, 3 and 6, then you see how this is falling out of that important sense of the earth being without form and void.

In each of the first three days, he is forming what is without form. In the last three days, he's filling what is empty. So, day 1, 2, 3, God is forming because the earth is without form. And in the second set, he's filling with creatures that which was empty.

And all of these days, as we'll see next week, climax with the establishment of man and his dominion over everything as the centerpiece, the vice-regent of the Creator God in the world that they inhabit.

The days correspond to each other according to God's acts. The earth is given the capacity to produce plants. And then with mankind, as we'll see, this relationship to God, this relationship of God to humanity begins to frame the next two chapters.

And therefore, the whole story of redemption. Creation is linked together in specific relationships that are established by God. But here's the important point in this first section about God creating.

He remains in a category all to himself. Everything that is is interrelated to each other and to God. Categorically, we are the creation. All that is is tied under that category of creation. God is in a category of his own.

In the beginning, God created equals God's transcendence. Fancy word, transcendence, meaning above or beyond. We're talking about God being other. Other than us. Other than what he's made. God is transcendent.

He's not subject or bound to his creation. He operates freely and independently of it. He's free of his own will to choose how he relates to the cosmos that he's made. He's outside of it and in no sense is he dependent upon it.

In other words, he's fully sufficient within himself. Irrespective of creation. Irrespective of the universe that he's made. How different we are as creatures from this creator. Our status as creatures set certain limits in what we're capable of.

God has no such bounds. No such limits. He's infinitely free. If we take God's transcendence too far, we distort the image of God. Quite frankly, you end up with Islam. You end up with Allah, who's distant and humans can only hope to be in his graces.

But there's really no sense of contact with a God that's that transcendent. And so how do we wrap our minds around this? Well, theologians have another important term that dovetails with God's transcendence.

And that's God's eminence. His nearness. The fact that though he's independent of what he's made, he does operate within what he's made. He has a presence in all that he's made, as we'll see. And this is the second point.

God's Blessing as Nearness and Grace

In the beginning, God blessed. So in the beginning, God created as God's transcendence. He's above and outside of and independent of all that he's made. He's in no sense dependent upon it. But the fact that God blessed what he made is God's eminence.

It's his commitment to what he's made.

It's his will to have a relationship to what he's established. The verb bless appears twice in this chapter. Genesis 1 .22, God blessed them, that is all of the creatures that he had made, saying, be fruitful, multiply, fill the waters and the seas, let birds multiply on the earth.

And then again, what we're going to consider in detail next week,. Genesis 1 .28, God blessed them, that is man. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

Notice that after God creates animal life, after the second set of these three days is complete, we read of God blessing that which he had made. This is God establishing a relationship between himself and that which he blessed.

Now you might be thinking, God had already established a relationship.

He made it. That's his relationship.

And I think the significance of the fact that God blessed shows that there's a deeper integral commitment that's taking place. And it's very important that we understand that. If I could explain it in a sort of fainting way, when I met Alicia, we spent time together.

We had meals together. We spent time at each other's houses. We got to know each other. We had a relationship. But when I wanted to go ask her hand in marriage, I had to go to Victor. I remember chasing him.

It was like 5 a .m. He was leaving for the factory he worked at. And I was hauling down his street trying to catch up to that red Ford truck because I couldn't quite remember where the factory was. And I was like, I got to stay on his bumper or I'm going to lose him.

And I remember kind of going to him in the parking lot and saying, I want to ask your blessing on my marrying Alicia. We had already had a relationship, but asking the Father's blessing was saying there's a deeper commitment level here.

There's something more personal, something more costly. There's a deeper bond that's going to emerge. And that's kind of the background of the idea of God blessing what He had made. He's saying, I'm personally involving myself.

I'm personally committing myself to that which I've made. I'm going to be near and walk closely and guide and bless and cause to flourish and establish the steps of what I have made. And we find, of course, God.

I believe the second person of the Godhead walking in the cool of the day. Poor translation. It's like the wind of the day. And the idea there is it's a storm theophany. It's God's presence. Remember when God speaks to Job in 38, it says, He spoke out of the whirlwind.

That's a theophany.

It's an appearance of God. God's presence was the commitment of His blessing, what He had made. The transcendent Creator of all comes near. Transcendence, imminence. Two very vital themes. Not just to Genesis 1, but to all of Scripture, to the eternal design of our redemption.

This idea of transcendence, distance, otherness, and nearness, closeness, intimacy. This is at the heart of what Paul says is the great mystery of our faith in Ephesians 5. The heart of God's blessing is His grace.

His grace.

Grace is not a response to mankind's fall. Grace is an attribute of God.

He is gracious.

The creation account, even when man is upright in the paradise of Eden, is overflowing with God's graciousness. With His care and the way that He establishes Eden to be a place that humanity can flourish.

And then His grace to invite them to participate in His rule over creation. To give them that great commission to expand the presence of Eden over all of the earth. Graciousness is exuded in almost every passage of the first two chapters.

And then even after the fall, we find this gracious God who had been committed to Adam and Eve. Why? Because He had blessed them. What does God's blessing result in?

Fruition.

Fertility.

In the time, in the ancient world, fertility was often deified. Most of the idols had some semblance of this token. You worshipped a certain idol for fertile crops or fertile wives or fertile bank accounts.

Fertility was the great need of humanity. And here the Scripture says, All productivity, all potentiality comes from the hand of this Creator God. Not from giving Him things as though He needed anything.

Not from appeasing Him with the blood of bulls and goats. But actually it's just by His grace. It's by His blessing.

Do you see?

This becomes very important for what follows in the next two chapters because the opposite of being blessed is being cursed. So here with this verb to bless, we have before us all of the redemptive aspects of the Gospel.

The point here is that God blessed what He created. He established a relationship. He didn't wind up the watch and leave it in the cosmic beach, so to speak, to unwind. He involved Himself. From the very outset of our time-space reality, Genesis 1 reveals that the Creator God is intensely and unmistakably personal.

This is almost too much for the human mind to grasp. He declares. He separates. He calls. He blesses. He exercises His divine will. He reveals Himself. He doesn't look apathetically on Adam and Eve, grasp after some sense of the divine.

He reveals Himself to them and walks with them and guides them and nourishes them and blesses them and clothes them. This is the significance of God's blessing.

So what have we seen?

In the beginning, God created equals God's transcendence. In the beginning, God blessed equals God's imminence. Thus, we should be floored by the awe of the infinitely majestic Creator who in every little part of creation preaches every day countless sermons to us that declare His glory.

As you drive around, try to get out of ceilings and away from screens so you can hear those sermons better. I tend to only have awe at God's creation when I'm watching nature documentaries, birds of paradise or something like that.

It's good just to go outside and sit on some grass and be amazed at the design of the cosmos. And what we're saying is this infinitely majestic Creator who remains fully independent of the wondrous creation, a completely other God who's utterly transcendent over all that He has made draws near to us.

That He's actually concerned about the things that burden us. That He actually understands the secret thoughts and intents of our hearts. That He invites us. This Creator God invites us to cast the things that we care about upon Him.

These are not competing truths. Truths that must be held together at every point of the Christian's life. If God is too transcendent in your view of the Lord or in your walk with Him or in the exercises of your faith,.

If He's too transcendent, He's so distant, so aloof,.

That your faith will begin to crumble. You'll feel like you're out here all alone. That God, if He is looking at you, He's looking at you vengefully. He's looking to trip you up or deceive you. If He's that distant, certainly He doesn't care and I'm out here on my own.

But if He's too near, if He's too personal, then He becomes a lot like you. Jesus, take the wheel. It's like, you know, I don't want to be flipping here, but it's like, come on, that's like mere blasphemy.

So we're talking about the exalted Lord Christ. We're talking about the one who angels cannot look at. They hide their faces with their wings as they scream out holy. You know, this is not co-captain Jesus.

So we have to maintain the transcendence too. He can't be so imminent that we make Him altogether like us. He is totally other and yet He's near. He's totally other and yet He became Immanuel. God became incarnate.

We must hold these truths as mutually reinforcing, mutually necessary for life of faith and worship. I'm convinced that everyone in this room is stressing one or the other too much. Including me. I had to examine myself.

Lord, are you too other and too distant or too close and too much like me? Do you wink at the sins I wink at?

Are you that imminent?

Are you so distant that it almost doesn't even matter? What's the dynamic of how we're looking at God? These two things must be held together. Transcendence preserves our fear of God. Imminence preserves our boldness to come to Him.

As I forget the preacher who said it, but it's just a great quote. Only the king's child has the boldness to knock on his door at 3 a .m. and come into his lap for a cup of water. That's what imminence means to the Christian.

I was reminded of this. I haven't seen it for some time. I don't necessarily watch it. It's been so long I can't vouch for it. I do know that a theologian wrote a little book on it, which is rare. It's a movie by Terence Malick, who I believe is a Roman Catholic.

Very interesting filmmaker. And it's a movie called Tree of Life. And if you watch it, you'll probably hate it. Unless you read the book by Peter Lightheart, who's a theologian. And he explains some of what's going on in the scenery.

To make a long story short, in the story you get the sense it's very compiled. It doesn't follow a linear story. You get the sense that there's this family. And it seems to be taking place during Vietnam.

And this brother, who's stateside with the family, running the business, all that. Their whole family is devastated when they hear of the loss of their brother, their son. And it shows them on the tarmac as they're watching that flag-draped coffin go by.

And as it's edited, of course, you keep hearing these whispers as they're devastated. And there's this whisper that runs behind the movie.

Where were you? Where were you?

It's a prayer.

Where were you? Where were you?

We've lived our lives before you. We put our trust in you.

Where were you?

And then the film, it immediately runs into this really long expanse of weather being formed. Storms, lava flowing down a mountainside. It's like this very epic slideshow of nature. And if you watch it, you go, this is really bizarre.

But when you hear that, where were you?

And you're watching the storms and the stones and the waves.

And where were you?

You get to realize, this is Job.

This is Job.

This is Job. You remember, Job begins with this lament. He loses his family. Now, he doesn't say, where were you? He actually begins his lament, his grievance, this highly stylized prayer, bringing down a curse upon himself.

Cursed is the day I was born. Cursed is the day my mother nursed me. Cursed is the night she conceived me. And then, as the lament begins, he begins to decreate himself. Let the white become darkness.

Let the stars be pitch black. He begins to take the creation count and turn it inside out. This is how much I want to be removed. I don't just want existencelessness. I want there to be no creation at all.

This level of suffering.

And you know the story. This is just chapter 4. It goes on a long time, this lament. And friends come and friends go. Eliphaz comes. You get to chapter 37, and Job kind of makes his last stand. I've heard it.

I understand what you guys are saying, but you just don't know the issues.