Genesis 1.1 – 2.2
A Sermon Preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 28th February 2021
We are looking at the ancient creeds. Starting out on a new ministry in a city church, I thought I should lay my cards on the table and tell you what I believe. These days you can’t take it for granted that a Christian minister believes in the Christian Faith. When I was told a certain church’s minister was an atheist—well, I wasn’t surprised—I knew of two others. Today we are looking at the part of the Apostles’ Creed that says God created the heavens and the earth. This means the universe: earth, sky and the spiritual realms unknown to us. God created everything except himself.
If you ever attended the New Year’s Festival at Babylon you’d have heard the story of Marduk’s victory over Tiamat. You’d have to be about 3500 years old, as Babylon is no more. Anyway, Tiamat was enlisted by the rebel gods to fight for them. She creates an army of monsters better than any horror science fiction movie you’ve seen. An emergency assembly of the gods elects young Marduk to lead the defence.
“So they came together—Tiamat, and Marduk, Sage of the gods;
They advanced into conflict, they joined forces in battle.
He spread wide his net … and enveloped her.
The evil wind … unleashed in her face.
As she opened her mouth … to devour him
He made the Evil Wind to enter that she closed not her lips:
The Storm Winds, the furious, then filling her belly.
Her inwards became distended, she opened fully wide her mouth.
He shot therethrough an arrow, it pierced her stomach,
Clave through her bowels, tore into her womb:
Thereat he strangled her, made her life-breath ebb away,
Cast her body to the ground, standing over it.
The war over, Marduk has a brilliant idea. He will carve up the body of the fallen god and make something wonderful:
He rested, the Lord, examining her body:
Would divide up the monster, create a wonder of wonders!
He slit her in two like the fish of the drying yards,
The one half he positioned and secured the sky …
The other half became the earth. The universe, you see, is the dismembered carcass of a dead god. This is what the Babylonians were celebrating about the time Moses led the Israelite slaves into the wilderness, and it is against this background we should probably read Genesis 1, which says simply, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In the former understanding the physical world is divine. You build an open-cut mine, you are opening the body of a god. There are still people who want to see the world this way. Gaia is a divine person, you shouldn’t disturb her. A Christian also needs to tread carefully, but not because the world is divine; the world is outside of God—away from him—an object of his handiwork. To be sure you would hesitate to mess with an artist’s creation. But later in the chapter this artist will actually invite us to contribute to his masterpiece.
The Babylonian myth finishes with the creation of human beings. The defeated gods are worried they will now have to do all of the work, so they ask Marduk for mercy. He responds by creating humans to do the work. According to the Enuma Elish humans are the slaves of the gods! According to Genesis 1? Man—he and she—was created to be the representation of God in the physical world, to be its king and queen, to possess and manage and enjoy it, to be god to the world as God is God to them.
So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’
Knowing this helps us understand the nature of our relationship with the physical world, and God’s relationship to the physical world. One immediate difference it makes is that Christians are thankful people. You wake up on a clear morning after a shower of rain and can’t help thanking God.
Morning has broken, like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the sunlight, praise for the morning:
God’s recreation of the new day.
Paul says of the idol worshippers of his day that they became thankless. Have you noticed that as less and less people in this country know God, they are less and less thankful. If you think the whole world is a mechanical system, there is no one to thank. Many people say they believe in some sort of spiritual force. But a force is not a person. You don’t thank your toaster every time the bread pops out. You might swear at it, if it doesn’t. And you don’t thank Centrelink every time you get a payment. It’s a big impersonal system; what comes to you is your right. But you thank God, because you know that behind the gift is a person of good will, a Father, who is full of loving kindness towards his children. Do not think that our secular revolution is not having profound effects on people’s mentality.
One cannot discuss creation without saying something about evolution. A generation of us grew up with prayers at school, and hymns on the ABC, even if we never went to church. Then we went to university, or training of some kind, and the ABC chopped out its hymn programs and removed all mention of God. Evolution explains everything, we were told; there is no need for God; if there are any problems, Science will deal with them—Science the Secularist’s Saviour. I am not against science. It is one of God’s gifts. But if we make it our God, we are in for trouble.
But what are we to make of evolution? When Darwin proposed that all living things developed from a single original cell of life in some ancient pond, it seemed like a very neat solution to something that had puzzled biologists for millennia. Tiny changes gave a plant or animal an advantage or disadvantage. Those that were less able to survive died out, those with the advantage lived. The basic atom of life is the living cell. In Darwin’s time cells could be seen with a microscope: a tiny sack of life moved from within by unseen forces. It was thinkable that something like this had started everything off. Cells have this strange property of being able to split in two and become two cells, and four, and eight, and that way it didn’t take long to fill the earth.
It was an elegant theory. It satisfied the scientific mind, which is always looking for natural answers. It appealed to me as a young science student.
People who have had no scientific training are at the mercy of experts, who say evolution is fact—science has proved it. Those who continued to believe God had created the species were ridiculed, and Genesis declared to be an unscientific myth. Naturally many Christians reread the Bible asking whether it could be compatible with the new theory, and many decided that it could. Evolution cannot explain how thing began in the first place, nor how the physical laws originated to make it all possible. God may have used a process to bring things to where he wanted. If he knows every sparrow and every hair on your head, and if he controls the fall of the dice, then he knows the state of every electron and can easily guide what seem to us as random events to the goal he intends. So, there is nothing impossible in principle about the diversity and beauty of the animal and vegetable world having come about this way. This way of thinking is called “theistic evolution”— theism is belief in a personal creator God. This was my position when I graduated from university. However, there are some problems.
As I said, Darwin’s theory said that all the forms of life on earth had developed slowly from earlier forms as small changes were favoured by natural selection—the survival of the fittest; the less fit life-forms became extinct. This means that if you could see all the animals and plants that exist today and those that have existed in the past, there would be a continuum. I can’t think of another word. What I mean is that any animal you picked would be very like the animal it had developed from, and you would be able to see all its ancestors going back to the beginning. The biological world today is not like that. Bacteria and birds, insects and fish, reptiles and mammals are very different. The families of living creatures, and the different species are like islands in a sea of no other living forms. Darwin explained this. He said the intermediate forms of life were missing because they had become extinct. They would be found in the fossil record. So the hunt for fossils was on, and has been going on for over 150 years.
Charles Darwin’s, Origin of Species was first published in 1859. In 1959 Everyman’s Library published a centenary edition with an introduction by the head of Canada’s state biological services reviewing the evidence for the theory that had accumulated over one hundred years. The big problem was that what Darwin had predicted would be found in the fossil record hadn’t been found. That was the beginning of my doubts.
Fast forward another sixty years and what is the situation? Tens of thousands of extinct species—species like the dinosaurs—have been found, but not the in-between forms that the theory of evolution says were there. There is no evidence that life then was ever different to what it is now: separate islands of life in an ocean of non-life.
Of course, a peach and a nectarine are similar and it is thinkable that one developed from the other— likewise a dog and a wolf. With dogs and cats it is more difficult, though even there you can think they may perhaps be related. Some people see examples of evolution like this as proofs of the general theory. However, when it comes to the differences between four-footed animals and birds, or insect and reptiles, it is very difficult to imagine how that sort of transformation could ever have happened by small jumps leading to viable forms of life. I mean, a bird’s lung has a totally different design to every other animal. We breath in and out; the air passes through a bird more like a jet engine. It needs to, to give the bird the amount of oxygen to produce the energy it needs to fly. And it is difficult to see how the continuous flow design could have developed from the lung design.
Nevertheless, evolution hangs around, partly because it is the cornerstone of the materialist worldview, and partly because no one has been able to come up with an alternative that doesn’t require input from God; it is the modern myth.
And there is not just the lack of evidence in the fossils. In 1953, a century after Darwin, Watson and Crick worked out the structure of DNA and the mystery of how heredity works was solved. DNA is a molecule consisting of two chains coiled around each other. It contains an information code with instructions for building proteins, and ultimately the body of whichever creature it belongs to. This began a biological revolution that continues to our own time. Biologists are now able to work out at the level of the atoms and molecules how evolutionary changes could happen – and they can’t—not on the scale the general theory requires.
There are many other questions: how old is the earth, what happened to the dinosaurs, why is there only one species of human beings, and many more, but let me say this: when you look at the structure of a flower, or the pattern of colours of a bird, or the bounding of a kangaroo, or the arrangement of the muscles in the human body, and you say to yourself, “God must have done this,” your instincts are right—you are seeing things as they are, and you are right to give praise.
Now let’s have a brief look at Genesis 1. It tells us first that God created everything there is. Initially it was all mush: plasma—call it what you will. Nothing was different from anything else. Genesis calls it “waters”, or “the deep”; it was “without form and empty”. It’s all there, but it’s an undifferentiated mess. But something is going on: the Spirit of God is moving over the face of the waters like a giant bird. God, you see, is above it all—outside—contemplating what to do with all this primeval stuff. He speaks, and light shines in the darkness, and he separates light from darkness and calls them day and night.
How does God separate light from darkness? There is nothing yet about the world turning, or sun, moon and stars. But light is cool stuff. When he was a kid, Albert Einstein used to dream of riding on a light beam. What would it be like? What could you see? A photon of light travels 150 million kilometers from the sun to earth, through total darkness, and none of it leaks away. Amazing! Genesis tells us light was God’s very first step in the shaping of the universe, and then Einstein comes up with this crazy thing that the amount of energy you can get from matter is its weight multiplied by the speed of light squared. It seems that light is somehow at the foundation of things.
The next thing God does is create a firmament—a dome—the sky I guess—to separate the waters above from the waters below. So now we’ve got the universe above the sky and the world below, and this big dome separating them. Which again is very cool. The atmosphere is somehow kept in—we know now that gravity is the trick—if it wasn’t for that, Earth would have lost all its water, like Mars.
Then come all these other separations: land from oceans, animals from each other—each according to their kind.
If you are a Buddhist or any other kind of monist, the separation of everything—heat from cold, light from darkness, love from hate, good from evil, me from you—is the great evil. The final state of salvation is where everything is fused back together: Nirvana. You spend your life trying to get above the world of differences. Among other things, you have to kill your ego, because that makes you different to others. A woman once told me she had lived for fifteen years practising Buddhism with a guru—trying to overcome her ego. She realized in the end it was one big ego trip, and turned to Christ in repentance and faith.
According to Genesis 1, differences are God’s doing and are good. He started with custard and made the world with all its variety. He looked at everything that he had formed and it was good. Your ego is with you forever. One day God will give you a new name, and there will be no one else in the whole universe who has that name; it will be you, and you alone.
There is so much in this chapter, and yes, there are problems. But I for one have not given up on it. God has told us how he wants us to think of creation. That is how we will find our true place in it—us the physical world, us and the animals, us and each other, us and him, us and time, us and the other sex. There is subject matter here for many a sermon.