Genesis 1:1-2:4 Beginning with God

Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service. This is a message from the series, Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis, by Pastor of Teaching and Vision, Don Filsek.

If you'd like to learn more about Recast or access our sermon archive, please visit us at recastchurch .com. Here's Pastor Don.

Beginning the Genesis Series at the Start of a New Year

This morning we're going to be kicking off a new study in the book of Genesis. I figured, why not start a new beginning at the beginning of a year in the beginning? And so that's where we're going to be.

A sermon series entitled, Beginning with God in the Book of Genesis. And that really is, as we're going to see in our text here in Genesis chapter 1, the place where we start. We start with God. And I thought that would be a good thing for this year.

Some people have asked me, why Genesis? And you can ask that about any book of the Bible that I'm going to preach through. Why choose that one? The honest answer is that we're due for a trip in the Old Testament, and I selected Genesis.

I don't know if I could have gone wrong, to be honest, because one of our core understandings here is that all of scripture is God-breathed. It's all inspired by him. And so it could have been Malachi, it could have been Isaiah, it could have been Ezekiel, or any one of the Old Testament prophets, or Leviticus, or whatever.

But I wanted to start in Genesis, and I thought that this idea of starting there in a new year was a good thing. Here at Recast, this idea that all scripture is God-breathed that therefore it is able to help us to grow in our faith.

And you'll see the word simplicity on the wall, and that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. What the word simplicity as a core value here at Recast means is that we have a, I hate to call it streamlined, but we have a specific method for you to grow in your understanding, in your faith, in your relationship to God.

And it's just simply this, that our desire is that everybody who is here, that calls Recast Church their home, is growing in three areas, three arenas of your life, that you are growing in faith, you are growing in community, and you are growing in service.

And we believe that if you take those three areas of growth seriously, then you are on the correct road towards a deeper relationship with God. Now, how many of you know that growing, anybody can grow, right, from any point where you're at.

So some might have been Christians here for years and years and years. Can you still grow? Yeah. Some of you here are just barely scratching the surface of who God is and trying to figure out what is this whole Jesus thing about, and what is all that?

Can you grow? Grow in faith, grow in community, grow in service. And that's our desire. And specifically in this area of faith, I believe that we grow in faith primarily by taking in God's word, hearing it, listening to it, believing it, and then applying it to our lives.

And that is the method, the primary way that we grow in our faith is by coming in contact with God through the pages of scripture and allowing that to transform us and change us from the inside out. We're gonna sing a song called Inside Out here in a few minutes.

But that idea that we're changed by coming in contact with God's word. Our text is the first revelation of God given to humanity. And I really fear that the view of God can get lost to us in Genesis 1 because of the tussle about science and creation and evolution.

How many of you would agree with me that this first chapter of the book, really of the Bible, the book of Genesis can be somewhat controversial? Anybody? Raise your hand if you agree with me on that, that it tends to be a little bit controversial.

This idea of God the creator and all the way that he sets it out. So let me set the stage and just stay up front in my introduction that Genesis is not a science manual. Okay? It does however claim to be putting forward the stages of creation as a historical account.

But if you are primarily coming to this text to understand science, then you're missing the point of what is recorded for us here. As a matter of fact, if you're approaching this text from a scientific standpoint, it's going to leave you with more questions than answers.

Would you agree with me on that? Because this is not a recipe for how to create a universe. Okay? It's not like you throw these things together, you follow what God did and you get a universe. Okay? It's not a science manual.

It's not a recipe. That's not the point of this text. That's not why it is here. The entire text is here and meant to focus us on our attention to who God is. That's the point. We will see God, for example, create light in this text.

And as many questions as we want to ask about the creation of light. Any of you kind of curious about how light was created? The text isn't going to answer that question for us, but it is going to show us a creator God who created light.

And that is to, ought to produce awe and wonder in us. That is what the text is supposed to do. And my prayer and my hope is that by the end of this text, regardless of where we land on different views of the way to understand this text, that ultimately it produces within us awe and wonder, which leads to worship and praise to the creator of all things.

Ultimately, this is an introduction to God. We're going to meet him here in this text, to know him as almighty creator. And as I said, we might disagree on some things that I say this morning. As a matter of fact, there may be some in the room that are so far into the scientific understanding of things and so far down that road that I might appear like a caveman to you.

By just explaining what this text means at face value, you might say, Don just has not addressed modern science. And I'm not here to give you a science lesson this morning. Okay? That's not the purpose of a pastor.

I don't come to this text and go, well, here, let me explain the science of the text. What do I want to do? I want us to understand what scripture says here. So that's what I'm going to try to do this morning.

And like I said, I might be a caveman to some of you by the end. But I hope that all of us will come to deal with the text in such a way that we will at least leave here with an understanding of what Genesis 1 has to say about God and about the way that history began.

That you will know what scripture says about those things. So let's open our Bibles to Genesis 1. It's going to be a longer Bible reading. Settle in. Turn in the Bible. Go ahead and pull the Bible in the seat back in front of you out.

And you get to turn to page one. Turn to page one in that Bible. And if you don't own a Bible, you can take that one with you. It's our desire for everybody to have a copy of God's words. So we've got boxes of those in the back room ready to replace any that are taken this morning.

Just don't take a bunch and sell them on eBay, please. If you take it, just read it for yourself. But follow along as I read Genesis 1 and we'll read all the way through chapter two, verse four, to get all seven days in.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God 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 in the midst of the waters and let us separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.

And it was so. And he called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning. The second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let dry land appear.

And it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seeds, and fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.

And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind. 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 heavens, to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.

Let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens, to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars.

And God set them in the expanse of the heavens, to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the 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 swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth, across the expanse of the heavens. So God created the great sea creatures, and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird, according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the sea, and let birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures, according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds. And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth, according to their kinds, and the livestock, according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground, according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God made man, created man, in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them, and God said, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed and its fruit, you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.

And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the heavens, or the earth and the heavens. Let's pray. Father, I thank you. I thank you for this text.

For the opportunity to talk about you as creator. And Father, I ask that you would fill our hearts with wonder, with awe, with amazement, with wonder at this text of your creation. Father, we look out at the world that you have created.

We have now, for millennia, studied this earth by science and by all of these means. And Father, all of that ought to lead us to a deeper wonder, a deeper amazement, a deeper awe in you and your creativity and your ability.

Father, I ask that you would move in our hearts to produce worship in us. And even as we have an opportunity to sing these songs, that they would be lifted up from hearts given over to you, rejoicing in you as our creator, as the one who can take that which is in the text chaos and to restructure it and order it into something that is good and not just good, but something that is very good.

We praise you and lift you high in Jesus' name. Amen. Think about the fundamental question that we have to really ask any time we encounter Scripture. And really, this question should set the tone for what is a highly controversial first chapter of the entire Bible and that is, why is it here?

I think it's a valuable first question whenever you come to a text, you read it and you kind of go, well, okay, I can understand the nuances, I can understand how this verse relates to this verse or the grammar of it, but why does it exist?

What is it there for? And I propose to you that despite a variety of things that Genesis 1 accomplishes, would you agree with me that there's a lot of different things that it has to say? A lot of different components and pieces and working parts?

It fundamentally exists to introduce us to God as the creator of all things. That's fundamentally why it is there. That's why we have Genesis 1. It's really as an introduction. And as an introduction, it possesses accurate and intentional detail that is necessary to know something about the one it is introducing.

So if it proposes to introduce somebody to us, then what it says must be true of that person, that one that it is introducing to us. Let me give you an illustration. Let me state this in a different way.

If I was meeting you for the first time and I told you about my NCAA basketball career playing for University of Michigan, I told you about my PhD in astrophysics, and then I walked you through how in the last Olympics I edged out Usain Bolt by fractions of a second in the hundred yard or the hundred meter.

How many of you would admit that would be an awesome introduction? Would that be a stellar introduction? But would it be accurate? You're not meeting me, right? You're meeting something other than me.

I'm just faking it. I'm just putting a bunch of things out there to make myself look good. Hopefully you'd catch on pretty quick that that wasn't really true. If the text says things like, God created fish by speech in a day, then that says something about God.

Right? Would you agree with me on that? That it's not just the notion that God created that we're trying to get at, but we're actually learning something about God by the method of His creation. By the way that He chose to create all of the stuff that we see.

If what the text really means is that God created some primordial soup, struck it with lightning, forming single cell organisms that evolved into higher life forms, then I'm reading a different text than you.

Okay? Are you going to get there by starting with what we read earlier this morning? Is that going to be a logical conclusion to what we've read about the way that things came to be? No. You're going to have to start someplace else to get to that conclusion.

Would you agree with me? So that what we're going to deal with as we look through this text is a little different than what the world might tell us about the way that things came to be. But again I want to highlight, and I'm probably going to say this a half a dozen times during this message, this text is not science.

It is not purporting to give us a locked tight, every question answered kind of account of the creation. Do you understand what I mean by that? Now is there some kind of scientific notions in here? Sure.

And I mean it certainly leads us down the road of contemplating and considering science to some degree. But it is not a manufacturing textbook about how to create a universe. It's not a recipe giving every detail in the method that God employed.

We're not looking at God as a manufacturer here in this text. But God enters into a relationship with His creation from the very beginning. The picture of Genesis 1 is less like a factory and more like a maternity ward.

Where the thing that comes into existence, the thing that is created, is precious, is valued, is considered dear to the One who created it. Creation is delighted in by God and is related to by God. And the One who made it values it as good.

And we will see by the end of the text, very good. As a matter of fact, we might get tired of hearing God declare that it's good because He's so engaged and so enthusiastic and so into this creation that He's making that He says at every turn, it was good.

It was good. It was good. And it's repeated over and over in the text. In verse 1, we start with who? With God. God is the first grammatical subject of the entire Bible. If you studied English, the very first sentence of Scripture, the subject of that sentence is who?

God. He's the One that we start with. The first subject. And in the beginning, God did something. What we really find in verses 1 and 2 is introductory. It's kind of a summary of the whole thing so that it's not step 1 in the creation process.

It's summarizing the entirety of what comes after. So verse 1 simply states that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The heavens and the earth being a euphemism for everything that exists.

Everything when you look down, below your feet, everything created by God. When you look up above your head, everything created by God. And then everything in between. Created by God. The heavens and the earth.

Everything was created by God. Verse 2 states something that maybe we haven't considered before. But God initially created the earth without distinguishing structure and empty as the text tells us. As a matter of fact, it says at the beginning of verse 2, the earth was without form and void.

And those two words, without form and void in Hebrew are the framework upon which the entirety of chapter 1 exists. It hangs on those two concepts. Because throughout this, we're going to basically see that it's without structure.

He creates it without structure at the beginning. So then he proceeds to add structure to it. He creates it void and empty and he begins to fill it with things. So all of the verses, all of the days of creation are organized basically either as structure, he's forming things and creating structures, or he's filling the space that he's created.

Does that make sense? So that's kind of the way that things tend to be organized in this account. But also consider that God is a God of organization and structure. Could he have snapped his fingers and created it all at one time?

He could have just spoken and it's all there. So I think we learn something about God by the way that he creates. He likes steps. He likes organization. He likes to do things in an orderly fashion. And he begins with a blank black canvas and shows us what he can do when given nothing to work with but himself.

And he's going to create everything. At this point in the text, at least coming from verse 2, at the end of verse 2 there's a suspense that's supposed to be there and we miss it a little bit. All is darkness and empty, but the Spirit of God is there hovering, signaling that something is about to change.

In the times of Moses, seas and deep water and darkness symbolized chaos and fear. And although I believe that this is literal water, the earth was completely encapsulated by water at this time in ancient history, the notion of chaos evokes fear.

And I think Moses, the people who read this in Moses' time as he was writing, it would have evoked fear in them, this notion of the world being filled with darkness and deep water over the face of the earth.

But the presence of the Spirit shows that God is going to make good out of that which appears to be chaos. The God who fashions good out of chaos, as we see in the text, very good things out of dark nothingness.

Have you met that God? Have you met the One who was able to take nothing and form good out of it? What about your circumstances? What about your situation? What about where you live? What about your upbringing?

But what about all the baggage and the crud that you bring into life or that you have encountered in life? Can God work in your chaos? Can He fix the darkness that you see in your own heart and in you?

This One who has created everything that exists, as we're going to see by just speaking it, it happens. Have you met that God? The first act of creation comes by a powerful spoken word from God Himself.

Let there be light. And there was light. Very straightforward, right? How does that work for you? When you speak, God lets His will be known. He says, I want there to be light and then light happens. Now, have any of you studied any physics at all or to the level of at least learning something about light and how light works and how little we understand how light works?

And He speaks it and it comes to pass. You know, I'd like to just sit in front of the TV and say, Sandwich! Chips and salsa! We might abuse that power a little bit, right? But that doesn't work for us, does it?

You don't just speak and it happens. Okay? You got to get up, go get the chips, go buy the chips. Oh no, we're out of salsa. What are we going to do now? He just speaks and it occurs, it happens. The power of God that He creates with speech shows both a demonstration of His divine will.

He wants you to know that He wanted light to happen and then it happened subsequent to Him speaking it. So He lets His intention be known first and then it comes to pass. But also there's something fundamental that we learn about our God here.

He's a God who speaks. He's a God who communicates. He values communication and speech and He chooses to use that as the mode of creation. And God saw that the light was good. Now, some have translated this word good as beautiful.

But either way, whatever way you want to translate it, this is God placing judgment on the creation and saying, I'm going to discern creation. This is good. I like this. This is beautiful. It's a value word.

He's valuing creation. It's apparent that God is pleased. He's enjoying the act of creation. Have you ever watched a little kid play with blocks or Legos and build a tower as tall as they can and their brother or sister comes and knocks it down and they cry about it or whatever.

But you know what I'm saying. There's delight and there's joy in creating something. Right? You see that? That's kind of the picture of what we have here with God creating. And He's like, I like this.

He's into it. Do you think about God that way or do you think of Him as kind of just stoic and standing there? He's like, this is good. This is good. More. More of this. I like this. And God separates day and night, light and darkness and He names the light day and the darkness night.

And after His work day is over, He concludes with evening and then arrives the morning. The first day was done. Now the first day precedes the creation of the sun and the stars. So many have taken this as a chance to attack the concept of day in the text.

How could there be a day without the sun and the moon and the stars? But I want to point out that it would have been very obvious to people of Moses' day that he was writing about a day. That's the way they would have understood the word in Hebrew.

I do not doubt for a moment that Moses had in mind here a literal day. I really believe that firmly. That's what he was thinking when he wrote this. He was thinking about a day. Even the way we divide up our work week comes from this account.

It's been understood all the way back to ancient times as a day. But many who are scientifically minded have already begun to turn to the question how do we have light without the sun and the stars? How is all of this going on?

And you turn to these scientific questions in your mind that the text is not going to answer. So there's an element of faith in this. Would you agree with me on all of this? There's going to be an element of faith.

We're talking about Scripture here. This isn't a scientific account. In any attempt to explain how there can be sun or how there can be light without the sun and the stars, you try to explain that with photons or wave particle theory or you can just geek out on astrophysics all you want and try to come up with an explanation for how light exists without the sources, that misses the point.

The point of the text is that God is the source of light. He's the creator of it. He dictates how it works and where it goes. He's creating the physics of it even in our text. The sun is not the source of light.

The stars are not the source of light. Fire is not the source of light. God is the one who in the text on day one says what? Let there be light. He is the source of light. As a matter of fact, we even know that in the end, God's going to remake this earth and there's going to be a new heaven and a new earth and it says in the book of Revelation, and there will be no sun for He, the Lamb of God, will be the source of its light.

God himself will be the source of light on the new earth. That's where it's all going. And we're getting a very basic introduction to the creation of stuff here and science is going to take millennia to try to figure some of these things out and even now we don't have it figured out and we don't even really understand if light is a particle, is light a wave, is it both?

We're just trying to figure that out and Einstein helped us understand some things and now they're trying to rework Einstein and trying to figure other things out. I'm quite confident that God did not need to follow the laws of physics in the process of creating the laws of physics.

He wasn't constrained to that. Day two is a day of forming structures. We're going to see in some cryptic language it can be difficult for us to discern and I'm not going to get into all the nuances of it but water below separated from water above.

What we ultimately have here is the development of atmosphere, climate, weather patterns. All of that stuff is being formed on day two. This is where the natural evaporation cycle and the climates came into being and His spoken word, the powerful forces of weather sprang into existence.

He speaks and the waters above separate from the waters below. Evaporation begins in this entire cycle of how many of you are grateful we have an atmosphere? Anybody glad for that? Some oxygen to breathe and some stuff going on between the waters above and the waters below.

I'm glad for that. How many of you like rain from time to time? How many of you like snow? Okay, okay. A couple, a couple people like snow. I didn't know if I was going to get anybody on that one. Of course, if you don't like snow, what are you doing in Michigan, people?

There's other places to be. There we go. What snow? We don't even have snow yet. That's right. God named the expanse above heaven and the second day ended. But let me just say, I mean, let me point out to you something that's just a very critical part of our worldview and our understanding.

Are we able to control the weather? When Sandy comes and hits shore in the Northeast, what is our recourse? What do we do? Hide. We run, we hide, we board things up and we run because we don't even know where it's going to land.

We take some guesses. I mean, you live in Michigan, so you know that they're really uneducated guesses when it comes to the weather. You can pretty much count on it being the opposite of whatever they tell us it's going to be.

So I'm expecting a snowstorm tonight or something. But we can't control the weather, right? We don't have control over this. This is an area where God has created this with the spoken word and these things come into being.

Day three is split between forming and filling. So it's going to have both components in it. Again, God speaks and the waters and dry land separate. He declares it and it was so. Seas form, the mountains raise, mountains, deserts, tundra, plateaus, foothills, underwater trenches, lakes, rivers, ponds, streams.

All of those features come with the spoken word of God. And God saw that it was good. He tells us, I'm still enjoying this, still valuing this, still like this. And then now on day three, in the two short verses of 11 and 12.

Now they're not super short as far as verses in Scripture goes, but when you think about plants, when you think about botany, when you think about all that is in the plant kingdom on this planet, two verses dedicated to their creation.

Boom. They're there. He speaks. Plants sprout up from the ground. I'm gonna geek out on you for just a minute a few times during this sermon. I took a botany class in high school, and I really love plants, and I enjoyed that.

I took an astronomy class, I enjoy astronomy. I kind of like science. I get into that. But think about the complexity. Some of you, you understand plants, some of you understand plants better than I do, but the components of flowers, pistil, stamen, roots, leaves, xylem, phloem, creeping ivies, the great sequoia trees out west, cacti, bananas, almonds, tomatoes, kiwi.

He speaks, and they're there. He speaks, and they come up, and they form. This is our God. This is a God who speaks, and it happens. Anybody impressed by that? Anybody kind of moved a little bit to awe?

He speaks, and cells form, and nuclei. And by the way, on day three, what did we see the first time? DNA. Plants have DNA. We actually see the ability to replicate. We see reproduction for the first time, where something unique that God creates is able to take from the earth components and form another one of itself.

Is that amazing? Any of you ever look at an acorn and go, oh my goodness, there's an oak tree in here somewhere? That's pretty amazing. Would you agree with me on that? Do you understand how a seed works?

I don't. I'm not sure that scientists really get a seed. Otherwise, we'd be building them. Right? We can reorganize them, and retool them, and restructure them, and get all kinds of genetically modified food.

I don't want to go there. But we can get all kinds of stuff. We can retool those things, but we don't invent new plants. God speaks, and there they all are. It's amazing. And as incredible as it sounds, I believe it.

And I don't only believe it, but I believe it's the main point of the text. We are meeting the God who creates all of this with speech by an act of His will, and He does so in one day. He creates the plant kingdom.

God was delighted in it, the text tells us. It was good. He admires His work, and the third day is done. Now a side note here. If I were making up, if I were Moses, and I was inventing the way that God created the world, so I'm going to just say, I'm going to fictionalize this, and I'm going to just sit down with a pen in my hand, and I'm going to invent a way that God created.

I might tweak Moses' account here, about right here. I might make the sun before the plants. Would any of you agree with me on that? If you were kind of just inventing this and making it up. But day four is when we get the sun.

Day three is when we get the plants. So which came first, plants or the sun? According to the account. Plants. But don't worry, because God had already created light, so they're going to be okay. Okay?

He created light on what day? Day one. Okay, so don't stress about the plants. I know some of you are getting worried about them. How are they going to last in the darkness until the sun is created? They're going to be okay.

All right? And on the fourth day, He continues filling by filling the heavens with lights. Now the purpose of the lights in the heavens, the greater by day, the lesser by night, and the stars and all that, the purpose of those lights in the heavens is for light.

Yeah, the purpose is for light. That's what the text tells us. Also, though, for marking time, festivals, seasons, for our ability to keep a calendar. They're structured in that way with order. So what we have on day four is God igniting the nuclear reaction at the heart of every star with the word of His mouth.

We don't comprehend the power output. Our sun is a meager star by astronomical units, by astronomical understanding. It's a meager one. It's not huge. It's medium-sized. There's some that are smaller and more dense that put out more power.