Genesis 1:1-2:3
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The genius of Genesis
Imagine you are sitting on a hill in the midst of a rocky desert under a starry sky. At the bottom of the hill there is an enormous campsite; people are gathered ‘round a thousand camp fires. Those people are your responsibility, you have led them in revolt against a cruel king, led them out of the only life they ever knew and into a nomadic existence in this brutal desert. You are deep in prayer for them and feel the presence of God in an unusual and powerful way – he is near and you know it – then he begins to speak to you. “Moses, I want my people to know where they have come from – to know who they really are – I am going to show you the creation of the world and I want you to write it down so that they can understand it and pass it on to their children”.
Then it begins. The campfires fade away and all you see is darkness. You are no longer on the hill in the wilderness of Sinai you are alone in the centre of nothing. Then you are blown away by a burst of energy: you, and everything else that exists, is accelerating away from the explosion – you realise that nothing has just become something – you are surrounded by stuff that exists flying at unimaginable speed towards an unknown destination!
The stuff expands for billions of years, but that time passes quickly for you. In your vision of creation everything is accelerated. The dust swirls into huge saucer shaped clumps; something invisible – a massive force - is now pulling the clumps together. Huge pressures squeeze the dust into a heavy mass. Then something happens… you have seen it before, when a dry piece of wood gets hot enough suddenly to burst into flame, the heavy spheres of matter burst into light and the universe – because you can now see that there is a universe – is peppered with billions of stars blasting light and radiation across an infinite sky.
Against the backdrop of a billion suns you see an insignificant barren rock-ball before you. It turns blue with an endless ocean; the ocean breaks up as huge masses of mossy green spread over the surface. Then filaments of vapour circle the globe and coalesce into swirls of fluffy white cloud.
It is so beautiful that you can hardly breathe.
You watch the creation of a billion life-forms, and then one unique creature; a being made in the image of God. In Egypt you had learned that only one human being – the Pharaoh – was made in God’s image, and now God himself reveals the truth; every human being is sacred because of the divine image; kings and beggars are made of exactly the same stuff, both the prince and the pauper have the same value!
The vision fades and you are back on the hilltop looking down on your people you are faced with a problem; how can you describe what you have just seen way that your people will understand and that is easy to remember to pass on to the next generation?
The solution to that question is the work of genius we know today as Genesis chapter one: here you have a wonderfully concise exposition of the creation of all things put in a way that is as accessible to Moses’ friends as it is to a modern astronaut. If you read a scientific account of the origin of the universe you find out how things may have happened; read Genesis one and you are discovering who made it happen, and why human beings are unique. You discover why humanity was created and, as you read into the next few chapters, what has gone wrong with us.
People today like to argue over this beautiful piece of literature, some insist that the days are literally 24 hour solar days, others point out that, since the sun was not created ‘till day four it cannot be God’s intention that we read it this way [1] . People who passionately believe the Bible can be found on both sides of this debate.
It doesn’t matter – the vital lessons of Genesis one to three remain the same whether you take a literal or literary approach to these passages. Don’t miss out on the genius because you are bogged down in arguments about timescales – shame on us!
We must understand that the genius of Genesis gives us something deeper and truer than the mere mechanics of creation. We know that God is able to build a universe in seven seconds or to allow himself the time to sit back an d enjoy a project that takes him seven aeons – let us allow ourselves the time to become captivated by the being at the centre of this first movement of this majestic book – the God who created us.
On eagle’s wings
The first time we meet God in the Bible he is hovering like an eagle over the chaotic earth deciding what he is going to make of it (1-2). He is about to get involved, shaping and filling the earth but here we see him hovering, as though he is weighing up the task, finessing his plans.
The Bible’s writers occasionally compare God to an eagle; you get it in Deuteronomy when he is caring for his people [2] . Wait on the Lord, Isaiah says, and you will rise on wings like an eagle – your frantic flapping will give way to effortless soaring! [3] Here is the Lord in Genesis, hovering above creation waiting for the moment to dive and get to work.
When God works, he speaks; and when he speaks things start to happen (3; 6; 9; 14; 20; 24; 26) His words drive the process of creation – he speaks and it becomes real.
I wonder if you have ever known what it is to be completely absorbed in a book; the writer’s words create a little world inside your head so that the places and people are real to you. Just as a human author can create a world inside your head, this divine author can create real worlds as he speaks – real people, real places that do not melt away when you put the book down. Put the book down and look at the world around you… God spoke and all this came into being!
Let’s get our heads back into His book for a while and consider some of the details.
The Shaper and the Filler
The first couple of verses of the Bible describe the world as formless and empty. These two words are keys to the rest of the passage – in Hebrew these two words rime: tohu and bohu. But God does not do chaos! So the poetry of the rest of the passage in organised around two ideas: first, he gives shape to the formlessness and second he fills up the emptiness.
This seems to be why the account of creation in Genesis is organised into six days of creation: the first three are about giving form to what is formless and the last three are about filling up the empty spaces God has created. Here it is in a diagram:
God forms… | God fills… | ||
day 1 | …light and darkness | day 4 | …the light and darkness with the sun, moon and stars |
day 2 | …sky and sea | day 5 | …the sky and sea with birds and fish |
day 3 | …dry land | day 6 | …the land with animals, plants and people |
The Bible explicitly warns us not to get involved in disputes about the meaning of words. So often when I read material about Genesis I find myself frustrated by people who are over-interpreting minute details in this passage and missing the truly obvious. By ‘obvious’ I mean the clear lessons that Moses friends and a modern astronaut can both take away from this passage. Here are two big things you cannot miss:
First, God is an organiser. He takes chaos and shapes it into something which is ordered and beautiful. Look at anything under the microscope and you will see organisation, the most chaotic things are often breathtakingly beautifully organised.
Second, God loves to fill those empty spaces until they are teeming with interesting things. All our most creative people have one thing in common, they’re dissatisfied with uniformity, God is like this – he does not do mass production – he abhors one-size-fits-all design. We live in a Designer universe and everything in it is a work of craftsmanship - not mass produced uniform life-systems.
Here is an example; a modern writer describes a bat...
Bats are like miniature spy planes, bristling with sophisticated instrumentation. Their brains are delicately tuned packages of miniaturized electronic wizardry, programmed with the elaborate software necessary to decode a world of echoes in real time. Their faces are often distorted into gargoyle shapes that appear hideous to us until we see them for what they are, exquisitely fashioned instruments for beaming ultrasound in desired directions
Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker
Whatever his real intentions, Dawkins vivid appreciation of the natural world often inspires me to worship!
So the creation story is written abound a structure – Genesis 1 itself is not chaos, it is organised – a simple structure that makes it very easy to remember and very easy to spot the big lessons: God brings order where there once was chaos and he fills up what was once empty.
The day that doesn’t fit…
Look at the diagram again and you see that the seventh day does not fit the structure. It goes all by itself almost as an afterthought (2:1-3) – but it is not an afterthought, it is the whole purpose of the creation – God rests and appreciates the universe he has made. The text says that God set that day apart as holy – a word that simply means different. The Sabbath is the day that doesn’t fit, in the structure of Genesis 1 it sticks out like a sore thumb. It is intended to.
We have just learned that Moses’ people had escaped from a society that revered only one man as made in the image of God – Pharaoh. Moses’ vision of creation had changed all that and taught them that every human being from a beggar to a king is made in the image of God and therefore we ought to revere one-another. Now there is another lesson: they had just escaped from slavery in Egypt, where every one of them worked seven days a week to make someone else wealthy. Moses’ vision was to change that too, teaching them that every seventh day they were to rest – to set the day apart as different. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, right?
The Eagle and His children
Remember the Creator God pictured as an eagle hovering over the chaos of creation? The Bible returns to that image later in a poem about God’s care for his people:
For the people of Israel belong to the L ord ;
Jacob is his special possession.
He found them in a desert land,
in an empty, howling wasteland.
He surrounded them and watched over them;
he guarded them as he would guard his own eyes.[c]
Like an eagle that rouses her chicks
and hovers over her young,
so he spread his wings to take them up
and carried them safely on his pinions.
Deuteronomy 32:9-11
When someone comes to faith in Christ, God takes that person on as his child, his personal responsibility.
In 1981 Bryan Organ painted a portrait of the newly engaged Lady Diana Spencer. It was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London until just after her wedding to Prince Charles. Soon after this a student slashed the portrait with a knife and almost destroyed it. Yet you can still see the painting today, but there is no sign of any damage – it is a though nothing had ever happened.
Once the unfortunate student had been arrested the gallery staff sent the work to an expert restorer who painstakingly re-wove the canvas and re-painted the damaged portrait. The result is indistinguishable from the original. Right now the creative God is engaged in doing the same kind of thing to you and I and the New Testament celebrates this in several places – here is an example “ we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” [4] . That word masterpiece translates the Greek poiéma – the word that gives us poetry – God is re-creating his bruised masterpieces.
God found us broken and damaged – in a barren howling waste – he spreads his wings over us and sets about repairing the damage.
He may need to start by restoring order to what had become chaotic. It is amazing what happens when you organize your life in the way the Bible teaches. Work hard, get adequate rest, and take time to nurture relationships with your family and friends. People feel the difference straight away. Then a s God re-organises our lives we get to discover the joy of a weekly day that doesn’t fit, a Sabbath set aside for God, the family and ourselves. There is a lovely old hymn we occasionally sing, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, verse five goes like this:
Drop thy still dews of quietness,
‘till all our strivings cease,
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace. [5]
You see, it is not hard work and responsibility that create stress; it is the chaos of an ill ordered workplace, or a badly organized life. If we allow this creative God to re-create our life patterns then we will find that we are enjoying life in a new and unexpected way.
His caring work continues as he sets out to fill our emptiness. Just as the sea was intended to be filled with fish and the sky to be full of birds you were made to be filled with the presence of God, the Spirit of God, and to carry this wherever you go. When he begins to re-create you, he fills you with his presence. But there is more…
In the beginning God spoke and created life. God is still speaking today and as he speaks he re-creates our lives… as his word gets to work our hearts and minds are made anew – we learn to think and feel differently. That is why God wants to fill you, not only with his Sprit but also with his word.
You see, God is creative, and he is still at work in you. Question: are you going to work with him?
[1] See Genesis 1:14-19
[2] See Deuteronomy 32:10-11
[3] See Isaiah 40:31
[4] Ephesians 2:8-10
[5] John Greenleaf Whittier 1807 - 82