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.
