18 August 2019

Sermon – “Creation—Who cares?” (Genesis 1:1 – 2:1)


It was way back in July 1925 that one of the most famous court cases in US history took place in Dayton, Tennessee. Known ever since as the “Scopes Monkey Trial”, it centred on twenty-four year-old John T. Scopes. He was accused of introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution while acting as a substitute teacher in a high school biology class. Unknown to him, his action was contrary to the state law of the time, which made it illegal to teach evolution in any of its public schools. Scopes was eventually acquitted on a legal technicality. But the case made headlines across the United States and served to fuel one of the most tragic church squabbles of recent times. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy was an acrimonious division that continues in some parts of the church right down to this day.

As with so many of the quarrels that have divided Christians over the centuries, it has generated far more heat than light. It has wasted energy and resources that could have been directed to infinitely more useful and God-honouring purposes. And surely the only winner in it all has been the devil, who must rub his hands with glee.

One of the greatest casualties in this controversy is the passage we read from the Old Testament this morning: Genesis, chapter 1. Skeptics scorn it as a hopelessly primitive, pre-scientific description of how the universe has come into being. They point to it as evidence that serious science and Christian faith are incompatible. And I suspect that for many the result has been to regard what the Bible has to teach us about creation with a certain degree of embarrassment—to ignore it or leave it on the shelf to gather dust.

To my mind this is a tragedy of incalculable proportions. For the more I read from this first chapter of Genesis, the more I find myself in the presence of truths so profound I know I can never reach the bottom of them. But let’s give it a try anyway, and open our Bibles to Genesis, chapter 1, where we read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

These first words of the Bible take us back to the dawn of time. Cosmologists debate as to whether that means ten or twenty billion years or something in between. But numbers and statistics are not the concern that lies behind them. Rather, it is to communicate the awesome truth that before anything existed, there was God.

It is hard—I want to say that for me it is impossible—to imagine complete nothingness, absolute emptiness. The closest our author can bring us to it is with the words “formless and empty”, utter darkness. It is a stark and chilling picture. Yet even in this utter void, God is present.

The ancient Hebrews were by and large a land-loving people. For them the sea was a place of danger and chaos—and this is surely the picture conjured up by the waters at the end of verse 2. Yet the author gives us the astounding picture of the Spirit of God hovering over it all. Biblical commentators have often commented that that same word “hovering” is used of an eagle in flight.

For a number of years our family used to spend our vacation on an island in St Margaret’s Bay. Needless to say, we shared it with a number of species of wildlife, including a family of ospreys. I remember many times looking up into the brightness of the blue sky to see one of those magnificent birds wheeling silently, seemingly motionlessly, above me, and never ceasing to be fascinated by it. So it is that the stage is being set. God is silently present and about to act to bring his creation into being. And it all happens with a word.

Into the unimaginable silence of complete nothingness God speaks: “Let there be light.” In Hebrew it’s just two words, yehi or. And with those two words the Bible tells us there was light. Creation had begun.

Science


What follows is not, as some maintain, a primitive myth. Rather, it is a carefully structured rhythmic exposition of God’s creative power. Each of the first six days opens with the phrase, “And God said…” And each closes with the words, “And there was evening and there was morning…,” followed by the number of the day.

Then look more closely and you’ll see that there is a correspondence between day one and day four, day two and day five, day three and day six. It has been observed furthermore that on the first three days God introduces order into the chaos, separating light from darkness, waters from waters, land from seas. Then during the second triad of days he fills the void, setting the sun, moon and stars in the sky, causing the waters to teem with living creatures, populating the land with animals of every description. We could go further and note that on the third and sixth day there is a double creation, followed by a triple action on the seventh.

Much more could be said here—and has been. Indeed scholars have devoted their lives to it. Whole books have been written about it. But it becomes clear that what we have in Genesis 1 is not a scientific, but a lyrical representation of God’s creative power. Yet, having said that, I am convinced that the Genesis account of creation opens the door to scientific exploration in at least three ways.

The first of them is by affirming the order that underlies the universe (quantum mechanics aside for the moment). That is, that God’s creation is open to our comprehension.

Secondly, by refusing to ascribe names to the sun, moon and other heavenly bodies, the Genesis account of creation was declaring that these were inanimate bodies. Other ancient civilizations saw the stars and planets as divine beings, possessing a power of their own to affect human life. But the Bible will have none of that.

Thirdly, as we move into chapter 2, we find God parading his creatures before the man to give each of them a name. And that process of cataloguing and naming goes on into our present day, whether it be in the realm of subatomic particles, as yet undiscovered stars, or living beings. Surely this is much of the work of science in bringing understanding and meaning to the world we inhabit.

And so, while Genesis is a pre-scientific document, it is not as some argue, anti-scientific. To the contrary, I think we can rightly affirm that Genesis opens the door to scientific inquiry.

Art


One of the mental images that I take away from Genesis (and I am prepared to admit that this may be fanciful on my part) is of God as an artisan. In my mind’s eye I have a picture of God coming to his creation each day and adding a much-needed detail—dry ground and seas, flowers and fruit on this day, sun, moon and stars on that, fish and sea creatures on the next, animals on the next… And each day, we find God taking a moment to look at what he has done, and declaring, “It is good.”

Five times we hear it said, “And God saw that it was good.” We hear it twice on the third day, once on the fourth day, once on the fifth day, and once on the sixth. Then, after all has been created and his work is complete, we are told, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

Now the word “good” in Hebrew can have a variety of meanings. It can mean good in the sense of good for something, useful. It can mean morally good, righteous. It can also mean aesthetically good in the sense of pleasant, delightful or beautiful. And I can’t help but thinking that that sense is at least part of what is meant when we read each of those five times, “And God saw that it was good.”

God takes delight in his creation—in its beauty, its majesty, its complexity. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” says Psalm 19. And in the gospel we find our Lord Jesus speaking lyrically about the flowers of the field, “that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these” (Matthew 6:29).

And so I believe that this first chapter of Genesis begins to lay a foundation not only for investigative science but also for artistic endeavour and for the appreciation of beauty wherever we find it. Creation calls us to stand in awe at the vastness of the night sky, at the whir of a hummingbird’s wings, at the colours of an alpine meadow, and to declare, “It is good.”

Stewardship


All of this brings us to a third lesson that this first chapter of Genesis leaves us with. It comes to us on the sixth day of creation and it has to do with your and my place within it.

In verse 26 we hear God declare, “Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule … over all the creatures…” And again in verse 28 we are told that God blessed humankind and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Perhaps like me you have heard environmentalists rail against these verses, claiming that they have provided justification for an uncontrolled exploitation of the bounty with which God has surrounded us, denuding the earth of its resources. But a careful reading of Genesis 1 reveals that that just is not so. Indeed, if anything, just the opposite is true.

So what does it mean for us to rule over all creation? German theologian and ethicist Helmut Thielicke taught that we can only properly understand our rulership over creation when we place it within the wider context of God’s sovereignty. He wrote, “We are not to rule and subdue the earth because we stand above the other creatures, but only because we stand under God and are privileged to be his viceroys.”[1]

The contemporary American Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann goes a step farther and places our rulership of creation within the context of Jesus’ teaching:

The dominance is that of a shepherd who cares for, tends, and feeds the animals… Thus the task of ‘dominion’ does not have to do with exploitation and abuse. It has to do with the securing of the well-being of every other creature and bringing the promise of each to full fruition… Moreover, a Christian understanding of dominion must be discerned in the way of Jesus of Nazareth… The one who rules is the one who serves. Lordship means servanthood… The human person is ordained over the remainder of creation both for its profit, well-being and enhancement. The role of the human person is to see to it that the creation becomes fully the creation willed by God.[2]

So it is that Eugene Peterson in The Message renders these verses, “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature so they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and, yes, Earth itself.”

The point comes through even more clearly when we look at God’s command to fill the earth. The verb for “fill” here has a secondary meaning of fulfilling, bringing to completion. And so part of our calling is to continue God’s work of creation, to enhance its riches, its beauty and its immense variety.

Our gracious God has placed into our hands an enormous gift in his creation. May we never cease to wonder at its vastness and complexity and to be awed by its beauty. And may we be faithful to his mandate to care for it and to tend it until the day when all creation is brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.




[1]     How the World Began, 67
[2]     Genesis, 32-33

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