Original Earth – Genesis Ch1v3to25

Sermons Archive - Greenview Church

And God said, let there be light and there was light. God saw that the light was good and he separated light from 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 a vault between the waters to separate water from water. So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it and it was so. God called the vault sky and there was evening and there was morning the second day.

And God said, let the water under the sky be gathered into one place and let dry ground appear and it was so. God called the dry ground land and gathered waters he called seas and God saw that it was good. Then God said, let the land produce vegetation, seed bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit, seed in it according to their various kinds and it was so.

(1:22 – 6:13)

The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds 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 vault of the sky to separate the day from the night and let them serve as signs to mark sacred days and days and years and let them be in lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth and it was so. God made two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.

He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on earth to govern the day and the night and to separate light from darkness and God saw that it was good and there was evening and there was morning the fourth day. And God said, let water team with living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.

So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teams and that moves about in it according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind and God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas and let the birds increase on the earth and there was evening and there was morning the fifth day. And God said, let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground and the wild animals, each according to its kind and it was so.

God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds and God saw that it was good. Those of you into photography might be aware of a shooting technique where a camera focusses on a subject in the foreground and it blurs out everything in the background. So here’s an example just so you can see what I mean.

This man is in focus clearly enjoying his music and everything in the background is blurry. It looks like there might be some trees in the background. It looks as if there could be a street perhaps in the background, but it’s clear the focus of the photographer is on the man at the front.

Now, I think that Genesis chapter 1 is a little bit like that illustration. What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean is that Moses, the author, the author of Genesis, he has put some things in the foreground that he wants his readers to focus on and he’s left other things in the background that are a bit blurry and which are less central to his purpose. So what’s in the foreground in Genesis chapter 1? Well, as we said last week, God is in the foreground of Genesis 1. God is the first character that we meet in Genesis and in the Bible.

In fact, God is mentioned over 30 times in the 31 verses of chapter 1 at a rate of over once per verse. So God is the hero. What we’re being shown already is that God is the hero of the storey of Genesis.

It is not Noah, it is not Abraham, and it will not be Joseph, but God. What do we find then in Genesis 1? We find that the who of creation, who made the cosmos and human beings is the great focus. Moses said that God did it.

(6:14 – 8:48)

And he also tells us, very importantly, why God created. And we’re going to see that at the end of chapter 1, what the purpose is, particularly for humans being created. For my money, the who and the why of creation are in the foreground of Genesis chapter 1. And more in the background are the questions perhaps of when and how.

If they are there at all, they’re kind of like the blurry streets and the blurry tree. They don’t seem to be Moses’ big focus. I mean, just think about this.

Moses isn’t writing to freed slaves in the wilderness with the intent of communicating to them the age of the earth or the exact scientific process of creation. Moses is showing the Israelites the God in whom they can trust. And he is showing them their purpose as they are about to move into the land to be those who take dominion, be image bearers in his world.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the when and the how questions are irrelevant. Tonight, we’re going to look at the debate that surrounds those questions. And we’re going to think about how we navigate that debate as Christians.

We won’t necessarily come up with all the answers or we won’t necessarily agree in everything, but we’re going to think about how we actually have that discussion, both in the church and missionarily as a witness to those outside. But we’re not going to get bogged down this morning in the debates in what kind of days these were, which there will be different opinions on. Because the danger is that we might miss the whole point that Moses is making.

We’re kind of focussing on the blur rather than focussing on what is clear and sharp. And what is clear and sharp is that God created the earth in all of its order and beauty. Similar to last week, we’re going to see some wonderful things about God that should cause us to praise Him and which will help us make our journey in this world.

(8:49 – 9:42)

So, here’s the first thing. We’re going to focus on five things this morning. The first thing is that God is unrivalled.

God is unrivalled. If you were reading Genesis 1 as an Israelite in the wilderness, something would have struck you in reading this chapter that is less obvious to the modern reader. Remember that at that time, they were in the wilderness, halfway between Egypt, where they’d just been freed, and Canaan, the land that God had promised them.

And both Egyptian and Canaanite culture were awash with gods and goddesses. And Egypt in particular had its own accounts of creation, its own creation storeys. And these often involved multiple gods.

(9:42 – 10:07)

In one of the Egyptian creation storeys, there are eight gods who together create the world, for example. The Israelites would have known about these storeys, and they would have been aware of other cultures where similarly, multiple gods were involved. In some of these creation storeys, you would get various gods that would get into a fight with each other.

(10:08 – 15:38)

And somehow, out of the brawl, the universe would be created. Can you see how different Genesis 1 would have sounded by comparison? There are no rival gods vying with each other. In Genesis 1, there is no god but one.

And we could easily miss this, that in Genesis 1, God has no rivals. That is something the wilderness generation needed to hear. They didn’t need to serve or fear the so-called gods of the Canaanites in the land, even as they didn’t need to fear or serve the gods of the Egyptians.

And surely the same is true for us today, even though our gods will look very different. People today still serve and fear and worship different things, whether it’s worshipping at the shrine of personal identity, whether it’s making material things, your functional God. Think of so many people who live their lives in fear of losing everything, or perhaps insisting that everyone must bow down to a certain ideology.

Ideologies today are gods that we must worship and serve. Friends, we need to be reminded that we neither need to serve or fear these so-called gods, because God is unrivalled. He is above all these things.

Now secondly, the second thing we see is that God is communicative. God is communicative. How does God create the cosmos? In what way does Moses depict this? Well, take a look at verse 3, and God said, let there be light.

And verse 6, and God said, let there be a vault between the waters. Verse 9, and God said, let the water under the sky be gathered into one place. And so on the pattern goes.

God speaks, He communicates, and when He does, things happen. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. Everything God commands in this chapter happens.

His Word isn’t 50% effective, it’s 100% powerful. Now Moses, it’s interesting thinking about this, Moses could have described this in different ways, couldn’t he? Moses could have said that God created the universe with His hands or His fingers. That’s often how we make things.

And there are other verses in the Bible that actually describe God in that way, that He makes the universe with His hands, with His fingers. By the way, of course, that is a metaphor, right? God does not have hands or fingers, He is a spirit, any more than God has a voice box, right? God is a spirit, right? Even speaking here is a metaphor, in a way, of a reality, yes? It’s conveying a truth of what God did. So why does Moses particularly choose this imagery of God speaking? It is surely because he wants to show us that God is communicative and that His Word is powerful.

If you buy yourself a Lego set and it takes you three hours to build whatever the thing is, as you follow the instructions, that will show me that you are persistent and that you can follow instructions. But if by some sort of magic, you throw the bricks down on the table and then you speak to the bricks and they immediately assemble themselves in perfect order, then I’m going to think that you’re an all-powerful being that can do anything. And you see, that’s what’s being conveyed here.

Of course, if you are a trembling Israelite, fearful of entering a land of quote-unquote giants, well, knowing that your God is communicative and that His Word is power would give you great confidence to step your foot into that land. We were thinking about this on Thursday night, if you were here, that often our view of God is far too small. We think of God as a slightly bigger, marginally more powerful version of ourselves.

And so we pray small prayers to a small God. But our God is communicative. He speaks and His Word is power.

(15:40 – 16:10)

Listen to these words from Jeremiah, “‘Ah, Lord God, behold, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm. Nothing is too difficult for you.'” Now, the third thing is that God is ordered. God is ordered or orderly, or He’s an organiser.

(16:10 – 16:54)

Whatever term you want to use. Honestly, this has blown my mind this week. And I’ve read Genesis 1 many times.

I’ve never really studied it in the depth I have this week. The level of order in this account is phenomenal. So you may remember, the key context for this is verse 2 of chapter 1. Last week, we saw that in the beginning, the universe starts as a formless and empty earth.

So there’s no shape to it, and there’s nothing filling it, no life filling it. It is therefore uninhabitable. If you created a human at that point, they wouldn’t be able to exist on earth.

(16:55 – 19:46)

And so God, in this six days of creation now, is going to bring shape and form. And He’s going to fill that shape and form with life. And we see this in various ways.

Now, just notice various ways that God orders creation. First of all, there’s language that’s used here. There’s the language of God separating things.

In verse 4, God separates light from darkness. And in verse 6, He separates water from the sky. And then there’s the language of gathering.

So not only does God separate, but He also gathers. Verse 9, God gathers the waters into one place, and the dry ground appears. So God separates things, and He gathers things, and in the separating and the gathering, He’s bringing order out of the chaos.

It’s kind of like when you tidy up your messy room. That’s what came into my head when I thought about this, right? You put one thing here, you put another thing there, you put certain things together, and you start to make sense of it all. But not only is there order in the language, there’s also order in the construction of the passage itself.

Obviously, there are six days of creation and then a seventh day of rest. So again, there’s an organisation. We don’t just get a list of things God made.

We get this order over six days and then a day of rest. And even within that seven-day structure, there is even more order. I’m going to show you this on the screen just to maybe make it a little bit easier to see.

There are actually parallels between the days of creation. So on day one, God creates the light in general. And then on day four, He creates the lights of the sun, the moon, and the stars.

And then on day two, God creates the sea and the sky. And on day five, in parallel to day two, He then fills them with fish and with birds. And there’s also a link between day three and day six.

On day three, God makes the land, and He makes the vegetables, the things to eat. And then on day six, He creates the animals and the humans who will live on the land and will consume the food. These days are paired.

(19:48 – 21:18)

And there’s even more structure here. If you think about it, days one to three are a group as well. Days one to three is God forming the environment, the place, the structure, the light, the seas, the skies, the land, and so on.

It’s the forming. Days one to three are the forming of the structure. But in days four to six, the focus is on the filling of the structure, all the stuff, the animals and so on that are going to go into it.

And amazingly, the order of this chapter doesn’t even stop there. Numbers are a big part of Genesis chapter one. The obvious number, of course, is the seven days, but there’s even more sevens going on in chapter one.

For instance, the phrase, and there was, you know, God said, let there be light, and there was light. That and there was, or your translation might be, and it was so, comes seven times. So does the phrase, God saw that it was good, comes seven times.

And it doesn’t stop there. Now, you need to trust me on this, unless you read Hebrew, maybe some of you do, out of your Hebrew Bible. But in the first sentence, in the original language, the first sentence has, guess how many words? Seven words.

(21:19 – 22:12)

The second sentence, Genesis one verse two has 14 words, two sentences, seven times two. And actually this section, the Bible division here is not very helpful. It actually runs from one verse one, really to chapter two, verse three.

That’s really the section. And in that opening section up to the end of day seven, God’s name is mentioned 35 times. Seven times five.

Seven is a very significant number. Again, this is written to the Israelites. A major part of their law and their life is the Sabbath.

And we see seven underpinning this. But it doesn’t even stop there. The number 10 is also significant.

(22:13 – 25:46)

How many times does God speak in Genesis chapter one? 10 times. 10 words. When God gave the law at Mount Sinai, how many words did he give to the people? The 10 words.

That’s another way of talking about the 10 commandments. And there’s 10 times that the phrase according to their kinds comes in this chapter. 10 is a number of perfection and completion.

This is a perfect work that God is doing. And the point I’m trying to show you with all of this is that there’s a very deep structure and a very careful symbolism that is built into the text and the telling of the creation event. Moses hasn’t just thrown this down.

And what are we to take from that? Well, surely, that we live in a universe that reflects God himself. A God of order has created a universe of order. If you think about it, the fact that there is order in this world is the reason that science itself is possible.

It’s the reason that you and I have come to expect that certain things will happen consistently over and over. When I mix substance A with substance B, it will always produce substance C. Why? Because there is an inbuilt level of order. Indeed, our universe is so ordered that even atheists will sometimes admit that it looks like it has been designed.

One of my favourite Richard Dawkins quotes is that biology is the study of complex things that appear as if they have been designed. God is ordered. He has created an environment that is structured so carefully that you and I can live in it.

And I think that points us towards purpose. If the universe is not chaotic, then maybe our lives too have a purpose and a direction. Well, that’s what the Bible claims, of course.

But then fourthly, and in some ways complementing that, the fourth thing is that God is creative. God is creative. I don’t know what kind of person you are, some people are highly organised.

They’re people of structure, order, to-do lists, high levels of process. And then there are other people who have no process, no structure, no order. They’re creatives, we say, don’t we? And they’re often the painters and the poets and the music artists.

They’re often the people who generate the new ideas because they think outside the box. Well, the interesting thing about God is that God is both ordered and highly creative. Don’t be misled by all of the order and organisation into thinking that God is therefore boring and limited and lacking in creativity and expression.

(25:47 – 27:16)

Because within this remarkable order, we see the glory and the beauty of creation’s diversity, the light and the lights. Think about this. Here we are all these years on, however long it’s been since creation and human beings, we’re still admiring the sunsets, aren’t we? On those rare occasions that we see beyond the clouds here in Scotland, we never get tired of it, do we? We never get tired of a canopy of stars if we can get away from the light pollution.

We’re never tired of it. Or think of God’s creativity in the many kinds of things that he makes, all the kinds of plants and trees and vegetables and fruits, the entire zoo of the animal kingdom and all of its diversity and glory. Think about it.

I know a thought that came to me this week. It kind of dawned on me. I thought, you know, God could have chosen to just create a small number of animals.

He could have just decided, I’m going to make a hundred of them and finish there. And it would definitely include dogs because we all seem to like dogs. Maybe, maybe cats.

The jury’s out on that. But certainly tigers and elephants and giraffes would have got in. And just to give us a little bit of variety.

(27:17 – 29:13)

Instead, to date, scientists have classified 1.2 million kinds of animal species. And some scientists think because there’s so many more that we’ve not found that it could be as many as 8 million that actually exist. Why did God make such an enormous diversity? Because God is creative.

He loves diversity and beauty and artistry and different tastes and different flavours and different colours. Christians sometimes have an awkward relationship with the world of the arts. And that’s a real shame.

Because I think that a theology of creativity and artistry can be built solidly on Genesis 1. When you are being creative, you are mimicking God himself. And there’s something here about aesthetics and enjoyment. God doesn’t just build things functionally.

He builds them in a fun way, if I could put it that way. Human beings need trees and plants and vegetables and animals to exist. But God doesn’t just provide a basic type.

He provides many kinds because that’s the kind of God he is. Do you see that Genesis 1 is so much more rich and so much more uplifting than what we often make it? We just make it this battleground of debate. And we’ve missed the wonder of who God truly is.

So God is unrivalled. He is communicative. He is ordered.

He is creative. And finally, this morning, as we run this message off, God is good. Now, just a brief explanation point.

(29:13 – 29:35)

Really this morning, we’re looking at, we’ve looked at the first five days of creation plus the first half of day six. We ended our reading at verse 25, which was the end of the creation of animals. Next week, we will pick up at verse 26 and we’ll look at the creation of humankind.

(29:36 – 30:26)

That section on humans is so important that Moses slows down and goes into much more detail when it comes to the creation of humans. So we’re going to do the same next week. We’re going to slow down.

We’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about part B of day six. But actually, this dividing line between even animals and humans is helpful for this particular point we’re going to make. Because one of the statements that comes again and again is that when God says something and makes something, He then sees it, i.e. He evaluates it, and He then says, it is good.

Look at verse four. God saw that the light was good. Or down in verse 10, at the end of the verse, when God creates the land, God saw that it was good.

(30:28 – 30:43)

And then in verse 12, at the end, after God makes the vegetation and plants, God saw that it was good. Same in verse 17, same in verse 21. Verse 25, after God makes the animals, it finishes by saying, and we now know what’s coming, it was good.

(30:45 – 31:51)

Now, good has the sense of something being fit for purpose. So if I build a chair, and you see it, and it looks like it might do the job, and then maybe you sit on it just to test it, and it works, then you might say that’s a good chair, because it fulfils what it was designed to do. It has no defect, aesthetically or functionally.

It’s perfect. It’s just right for what it was created to do. And that’s the sense here.

In the beginning, there was nothing in the created world that wasn’t just right. Everything was created perfectly according to its purpose, so that creation was set up optimally for human beings to step into it. It’s kind of like when you go into one of those show homes, and in the show home, it’s always the very best example of the home, because they’re trying to sell all the other homes to you.

(31:52 – 31:56)

Everything looks great. Everything is great. Nothing is defective.

(31:58 – 34:04)

And if they then sold that show home, the family that moved into it would be moving into an optimal environment. Everything’s set up for them to flourish. And that’s the idea, that before human beings are even on this scene, they have optimal conditions to flourish, because a good God has created a good world.

And even more than that, we will see next week that human beings themselves have been created optimally to fulfil their purpose, because this is the interesting thing. Only human beings are called very good. Everything else is good, but we are very good.

We are perfectly made for purpose to be God’s image bearers in the world. Well, it’s clear, isn’t it, that the world today is no longer this unspoiled good creation. This is no longer the world we’re living in, though not all goodness has been completely snuffed out.

In God’s great mercy, there are many faded remnants of goodness. And yet, as we see war and strife, as we see nature at times not behaving itself, when we see earthquakes and famines and other things, it’s clear that the goods and very good of Genesis 1 are not still in operation, not to that same level. And the storey of Genesis 3 to 11 will tell us how that happened, how we got from good to bad, how we got from order back to some kind of level of chaos, how we actually moved from light back to moral and spiritual darkness.

(34:04 – 35:29)

The Bible is going to address that. But it’s important here to recognise that God didn’t make the world this way. He created a world full of goodness, wonder, and blessing.

We face at times the temptation to doubt the goodness of God, to question God’s goodness in the way that Adam and Eve will fatally do. And when that happens, it sounds simple, doesn’t it? But we need to lift our eyes to the sky. We need to take a walk in Rooking Glen Park or somewhere like that and see the trees and the flowers in their beauty.

We maybe even need to stop, even just for one minute, to examine the wonder of us as human beings. And then we will be reminded of the glory and the goodness of God. Everything He makes is good.

Anything that isn’t good is of our making. And while we really don’t have the gospel here, this passage doesn’t take us to the Saviour of the world, Jesus, or a sacrifice for sin or His resurrection. It’s just the intro to that storey.

(35:30 – 36:36)

But I think it provides us with the foundation to the gospel. It teaches us truths about God and His world that will provide us with the foundation for the rest of the gospel storey. If you’ve ever played Jenga, you know that game where you push out the bricks and hope the tower doesn’t fall.

There’s a brick that in many cases you cannot push out. It’s on the bottom row and it’s in the middle. It’s not the left or the right one.

If those are pushed out and that brick is there on its own, then it holds everything else up. That’s what Genesis 1 is. It’s the brick of the bottom of the tower that is absolutely indispensable because it introduces the good God who created a good world and who made us to trust Him as we make our journey through this world.

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