Genesis 1.1 – 2.4
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral Sunday 29th December 2024
Russia attacks Ukraine with so many similarities to Germany’s attack on Poland eighty-five years ago that triggered WWII. And then the Middle East explodes. And who would have guessed that on top of everything else, Syria would fall, and Israel be standing up to the Houthis in Yemen. I cannot begin to think where is it all going. One thing is sure: the world will be a very different place when all this plays itself out. Followers of Jesus may know how the earth-story ends, but as for what happens between now and then, only God knows. But where did this Middle East conflict begin? Strangely, if you want to understand the struggle between Israel and the Arab nations you have to go back four thousand years to a man named Abraham.
For six Sundays this is where I want us to turn our thoughts. Abraham was the father of Ishmael through Hagar; Ishmael is the father of the Arab peoples. Abraham also fathered Isaac, through Sarah. Abraham’s grandson was Jacob; God changed his name to Israel. Ishmael and Israel are the beginning of a story that is still unfolding today.
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This seems pretty obvious, but it took the philosopher, Aristotle, to put it into words. If you ever write you memoirs, you will need to decide where to begin. Your birth is an obvious place, but you may choose a more dramatic moment. Whatever you decide, there will always be a backstory. How did I come to be a fifteen-year old in a hostel in Sydney throwing my clothes into a bag and making a run for it before that paedophile returned from the bathroom? There is no absolute beginning, for every beginning has a backstory. We pick up Abraham’s story in Haran, up near the border of Syria and Turkiye. But who is he, and how did he get there?
His story in the Bible actually begins with the creation of the world, though even that was not the beginning. Today we will make a few observations in Genesis 1–3.
How did the world begin? Some say it didn’t, but obviously it did. It is part of a dying universe. One day all its heat and energy will be gone (evened out) and everything will die. The fact we are still alive means the process hasn’t come to its end; if it were older than it is, it would have finished. So, there must have been a beginning. The first thing the Bible tells us is that God made everything.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …” This is not to be taken for granted. Our western secular culture tells us there is no god. The universe began with a cosmic accident and has evolved to where it is today: “In the beginning was an explosion.” You can’t get anything more random than explosion. A bomb goes off in the street: who will die and who will live is pure chance. The Bible tells us God “spoke” the universe into existence. “God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.” God spoke words; so, there is meaning behind our existence. Our instinct that things have meaning is real; meaning is not something you can invent. Why should we turn our backs on our deepest instincts, that beauty and order and colour and music bespeak mind, that there is good and evil, that we mean something and it matters how we live.
The civilization Abraham came from had a more sensible view of it. Maybe the gods got into a fight; the heavens are the entrails of a defeated god! Genesis doesn’t speculate; it simply asserts:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep.
God made what everything is made of, and then he switched on the lights:
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. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Here we meet the first of a number of separations, by means of which God fashioned a habitable world: light from darkness, earth from sky, land from ocean, plants from other species of plants, times and seasons, fish and birds, animals and humans. And it was good.
Hindus, Buddhists, and many others today and in the past disagree; they believe that differences are wrong. Everything should be one; if we see things as different it is an illusion, or the result of some accident. The goal of life is to escape from differentness and be fused again into the great ocean of the One: Nirvana. I heard a Buddhist woman say that for fifteen years she had worked with a guru to escape from her individual ego. “In the end,” she said, “I realized it was all a big ego trip.” At that point she turned to Jesus. But it was God who separated things, says Genesis, and it was good. This is the first value statement; morality begins here. Your destiny is neither annihilation nor the absorption of your individuality into the great soup of everythingness (or nothingness). You are becoming a person, hopefully a person who will live forever with other persons and with God.
Recently I went through a spell of depression. Most of you know what depression is like. You start feeling negative about everything. Your life, which normally is lit with meaning and hope, becomes dark and pointless. When it gets too serious you may want to end it all. But this is a sickness; mostly we recognize it to be so. In the middle of it one word rang in my mind: Life! Life is good; life is precious even when it is hard and you cannot see the way ahead. “In the beginning God created—created life. And it was good, very good. We may not know its meaning, but meaning it has.
But who says God made everything? Does me, standing up here and saying it is so, make it so? The Bible, the Word of God, tells us. But who says the Bible is the Word of God? Who wrote Genesis anyhow? When we ask this question we move a step closer to Abraham, for as I suggested before, this is part of Abraham’s story.
One Saturday morning I set off on foot to get milk at the local deli. I ran into a chap coming the other way. He had been an SAS soldier until his wife and best friend ran away together; he gave up on life, and went from being a muscular fighting machine to an anorexic weakling. He was discharged from the army on medical grounds, and moved into a flat opposite the church. “Hey man,” he said, “I’ve been reading the Bible, and hey, I didn’t realize—it’s a story.” It is, and you don’t have to get far into Genesis to realize it’s the story of a family. It’s Abraham’s backstory.
So, who wrote it, and in which language originally, and who translated it and did the final edit to give us Genesis as we have it today? We are not told, but one thing is sure: the story itself came from Abraham’s family; it is the story of his ancestors and descendants. God spoke to them; he spoke to Abraham; that is how they could tell us about things they couldn’t have seen. And at some stage they wrote them down. Tradition says it was Moses; he was certainly involved. But the story goes back before him, and it is not impossible that Abraham himself may have done some of the recording. Someone needed to, because what happened to him affected people in the future. People had been writing stuff down for a thousand years before Abraham came on the scene. Anyway, you can believe Abraham’s story, or you can disbelieve, but the consequences are great. This is a faith-commitment that will ultimately divides the world into the living and the dead, as we shall see.
What is Genesis 1 about? It starts with God making everything—all mixed up and formless—an undifferentiated unity the philosophers would say—and then God molded that stuff through six formative stages. This is odd. You would think God would have saved time and done it all in one hit. He could have. But it came about gradually in stages—just as modern science thinks it must have.
There was evening and a morning, the first—second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth day.” What is this all about? And why does it start in the evening, and what happened to the night and the afternoon?
I will tell you what I think. I heard it from an orthodox Jewish nuclear physicist, and it makes more sense than anything else I have heard. The evening is when it grows dark and things lose their shape and form. Sit out tonight and watch the light fade. Everything becomes tofu vabofu, (“without form and void”) just like at the beginning. The Hebrew word for evening is ‘erebh;’ it is similar to “Arab.” The Arabs were the people who lived in the desert, the place where everything lacks form; part of Israel’s wasteland is called the Arabah. “There was an evening” means that for each new stage of the world’s creation there was a formless beginning. Morning (borker) is the time when the light comes and things take shape. At the end of every stage of creation things were full of shape and colour and beauty. At the end of the sixth day: Dada! There stands a young man and woman. This is the climax of this chapter—what it is all about: human beings. God makes them like him—in his image—and tells them to rule the physical world; that means they will be gods to the world around them, but when they look towards him they are still totally dependent—for life and everything.
And there is one more all-important thing: God blessed them:
He blessed them, and 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.”
What is the meaning of this blessing? It has to do with being fruitful, multiplying, increasing, finding one’s place as a king or a queen in God’s creation; it has to do with finding happiness and fulfilment. If you are blessed, you have a future, a good future; you will be happy, even if what you are going through at the present is anything but happy. Blessing is happiness—not the happiness you create yourself, but happiness that is given you by your Creator—not the happiness that lasts for a while but ends with your return to dust, but happiness which is forever.
The opposite of blessing is curse. To be cursed means you have no good future; however good your life may be now, you are destined to shrink, to die, to be miserable in the end. This whole book, the Bible, is a book about happiness and blessing.
Genesis 2 tells the story of one man and one woman placed in a beautiful garden and told to care for it. They are Abraham’s ancestors, and perhaps yours and mine.
Chapter 3 tells how they were deceived into thinking they could do their own thing, away from God—create their own happiness—how they would not trust his word, wanted more than he had given them, disobeyed, turned away from the source of their life, and how they fell from glory into shame. It also tells us that the world fell with them, fell under the curse of death which God had warned them about.
Here we encounter something very strange, and very important. God warned them that the day they turned away from him and disobeyed they would surely die. “No,” said the serpent, “you won’t surely die.” And they didn’t. You would expect that God would put the blowtorch over this couple and let someone else have a go. Surely Adam and Eve deserved to be cursed, but no, the environment gets cursed—“because of you.” The New Testament tells us the creation was subjected to bondage for our sake.[1] And the serpent is cursed, but not Adam and Eve. The original blessing of Genesis 1 has not been totally annulled, but humans must now live life out of the garden in the realm of decay and death, and many, like Cain, will be cursed.
We live at a time when evil can be clearly seen, and it is horrible. Every night we see the suffering on our TV screens. I can remember once when the whole human race held its breath. It was 1962; Krushchev was moving missiles into Cuba. Kennedy knew the free world could never be safe if that were to happen. There was a stand-off and the world came close to nuclear war. Russia is again threatening the West with that possibility. And in the Middle East Israel is up against an enemy whose avowed intention is to drive them out, and is increasingly isolated in the world. The Muslim nations are in turmoil. Taiwan looks anxiously across the water at China. Sudan, Myanmar … there seems no end to it. The curse lies heavy over our world.
But God has declared blessing. He looked at all that he had made and it was very good, and he declared blessing on mankind. And now the Evil One has subverted all that and brought the man and the woman into disgrace. But this is not the end. Evil is real; it lies over the world like a blanket. But it will not defeat God’s purpose forever. God curses the serpent and speaks of his future doom.
I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between her seed and yours; he will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel.
Somewhere, sometime, a male descendant of Eve will destroy the Devil’s power, though he himself will be wounded in the process. There will be a turning of the tables. Evil will not have the last word. Blessing is the last word, and we know now that blessing has the shape of resurrection, and one man already has risen from the dead. But this is to jump a long way ahead. Today we have looked at Abraham’s backstory. There is more to it than we can possibly cover in one study. You can read Genesis 1–11 yourself. Next week we will see how God spoke to Abraham an incredible and strange blessing, affects people even today.
[1] Romans 8.