(Genesis 2:4-25, Isaiah 66:1-2a; 1 John 4:7-12)

I said last week that the biggest difficulty with Genesis 1-2 is hearing what they’re actually saying. Cultural differences are part of the reason for that, as the expectations and questions we bring to the text aren’t necessarily the ones it assumes; as I also noted, though, another major issue is the deliberate attempts to destroy their authority that have been made by those who don’t want to have to listen to them. In that respect, the issue with Genesis 1 is the effort to disguise pagan idolatry as science; with Genesis 2, it’s the modern impulse to reduce the Bible from God’s inspired Word to just another flawed human text. You see, a while back, scholars began to argue that the five books of Moses weren’t written by Moses—or indeed, by any one person—but were cobbled together at some point in Israel’s history from a number of pre-existing texts, and that whoever put them together did a pretty poor job. To my eyes, this idea has had its run and seems to be fading slowly from the scene, but it’s done a lot of damage; even if it ends up being generally rejected, it has still distorted our understanding of a lot of passages in the Old Testament—including this one.

You see, for a long time, our passage this morning has been treated as Exhibit A for this idea; after all, why else would Genesis start out with that grand picture of creation, and then turn around and give us another creation account? From our scientific point of view—remember, everything is supposed to run in a straight line—it makes no sense, and so a lot of folks conclude that what we have here is a different creation account that just got jammed in after Genesis 1 because nobody knew what else to do with it. But if we get outside our own assumptions about how things are supposed to be done, we can see that in fact, this passage makes perfect sense right where it is.

The key is the Hebrew word that the NIV translates “account” in verse 4, as in, “this is the account of the heavens and the earth”; it’s the Hebrew word toledot, which I’ve taken as the title of the sermon this morning. It literally means “descendants,” and it’s the word that the Old Testament uses to introduce genealogies; thus, for instance, Genesis 5—the genealogy from Adam to Noah, carrying the action up to Noah’s time and the great flood—begins, “This is the written account of Adam’s line,” the toledot of Adam. The interesting thing is, this word and this phrase are very important in the way Moses structured Genesis—they introduce each of the major sections of the book. The story of Noah begins with it, in Genesis 6:9. Genesis 11:27, which reads, “These are the toledot of Terah,” begins the story of Terah’s son Abram, later renamed Abraham. In Genesis 37:2, we have the toledot of Jacob—the story of his sons, and particularly his son Joseph. And here in Genesis 2, we have the toledot of the heavens and the earth—the account of their “descendants,” metaphorically speaking: the first human beings.

You see, Genesis 1 tells us what God did—he created the heavens and the earth—and this passage tells us what came of that, and thus what God’s purposes were in creating everything. Put another way, Genesis 1 tells us about the who, and it leaves the why to Genesis 2. To understand that, we need to understand a little more about what it means to say that human beings are created in the image of God. That statement in Genesis 1:26-27 is a loaded one, and we’ll spend more time next week looking at it, but the key thing here is that in the ancient world, when this book was written, the phrase “image of God” meant one thing: a statue of a deity in a temple.

For Israel’s neighbors, kingdoms such as Egypt and Babylon, establishing a temple to one of their gods was a very big deal; and while putting up the building was a great deal of work, that wasn’t the most important part. At the same time as some of the priests were supervising the construction, others would be at work making the image of the god or goddess; in Egypt I believe they made the images out of the heavy river clay and let them bake hard in the sun. In any case, as they shaped the image, of, say, Anubis, the dog-headed god, they would pray over each part. As they sculpted the eyes, the priests would pray over them to open them, that the god might see; as they dug out the ears, they would pray so that the god might hear; as they formed the hands and feet, they would pray so that the god could walk and use his hands; and when they were finished, they would blow on the lips to start the god breathing, bringing him to life.

That’s what religion was like back then; that’s how it worked. Your worship focused on the images of your deities, statues in human or animal form, or some combination; those were the representations of your gods and goddesses, so that you could see what they were like. Where the image of a god or goddess was, that god or goddess was understood to be present in the image. As a consequence, people believed that if they created these images and built houses for them, brought sacrifices and observed the ceremonies faithfully, they could ensure that their gods would be with them—and that if they didn’t, their gods would abandon them.

Now, I said last week that the central agenda of Genesis 1 is to establish that God is the only true God, and thus to challenge Israel’s persistent habit of wandering away to worship the gods of the nations; Genesis 2 takes that one step further. All of Israel’s neighbors believed they needed to build temples and make statues for their deities to be with them, but this passage aims to break the people of Israel of that idea. First, it assumes that God does not need a temple (though he will eventually have one built for himself) because all creation is his temple. This idea pops up in various places in Scripture, as in our passage from Isaiah 66: God made everything, all of it belongs to him, and he won’t be restricted to just one little house like all the other “gods.” It takes all of the heavens merely to serve as his throne, and all of creation is his temple, and how could any of us have the gall to think otherwise?

Second, we need to understand that the author of Genesis is thinking in precisely these terms. In Genesis 1 we have God building his temple, and in verses 26-27 he resolves to create human beings in his image. In verses 7-9 of our passage this morning, he gathers the dirt in his hands, forms it into an image, and breathes into the nostrils to give the image breath, to bring it to life—just as the priests of Egypt did with their idols; then, having awakened the first human being, God installs him in the temple, in the garden which he has created for the purpose. Creation is God’s temple, and we are his image which he has placed in his temple.

Now, to really get the full significance of this, we need to understand one other thing. You see, in Hebrew, there are two main words for God. One is “Elohim,” which we translate “God.” The interesting thing about this word, incidentally, is that it’s the plural form of the word “god,” and that Hebrew has not just a singular form, meaning one of something, but also a dual form which is used when there are two of something (two eyes, for instance); so the plural isn’t used until there are at least three of something—and this is the form the Bible uses to name the one true God.

Anyway, “Elohim” is the name for God as God, and it’s often used in the OT to emphasize how big and mighty he is, that he can hold all the oceans cupped in his hand, that sort of thing. The other name for him is his personal name; we don’t actually know for sure how it was supposed to be pronounced, because it was so holy a name that the Jews never spoke it, and so they eventually forgot how; our best guess at a pronunciation is “Yahweh.” Where the name “Elohim” tends to emphasize God-above-us, God as the almighty Creator who is beyond our comprehension, “Yahweh” emphasizes his relationship with his people, both as individuals and as a group; this is the name which emphasizes him as God-with-us. As Elohim he is the Most High God; as Yahweh he is our provider, the one who meets our needs.

I say all this to point out the fact that while in Genesis 1, God is referred to throughout as “Elohim,” here in Genesis 2 both names are used: without fail he is “Yahweh Elohim,” emphasizing both his power and greatness and his personal care for his people. The author is trying to tell us here that the God who is mighty enough to create everything simply by speaking is at the same time the God who takes care of his people and wants to have a personal relationship with us. He is great enough to earn our awe, and beside him all our problems shrink into insignificance, yet he is close enough to hear our every whisper and to care about every part of life.

So if this is our God, if all creation is his temple and we are his image, what does this say about us? Well, for one, it denies the modern scientific view that human beings are the next best thing to irrelevant as far as most of the universe is concerned, excepting only our effect on Earth’s environment. The late science-fiction writer Douglas Adams captured this well in his classic book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when he wrote,

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

He goes on like that for a while, but I think you get the point. Science has discovered that creation is much, much bigger than the ancient Hebrews thought, and that we are not in fact at the center of it, which is a good thing to have figured out. Unfortunately, scientists have gone from there to conclude that we are exactly as insignificant on the large scale of things as that makes us sound: we are unimportant residents of an unimportant planet in a minor solar system in one part of what is, after all, only one of thousands of galaxies in the universe, none of which would even notice if the day after tomorrow we blew ourselves to kingdom come. We aren’t even a flyspeck to the universe, after all.

Scripture’s view is radically different: we are the purpose of creation. God created the universe to be his temple in order that he could make us in his image and place us here. Now, this isn’t to say that we’re the purpose of creation because we’re so wonderful, nor does it mean that we have the right to do what we like with the rest of the world—which is, after all, God’s temple, not ours; rather, creation exists for us because God created us for a reason. It’s all about how wonderful God is. But because God is wonderful, he made everything that is so he could make us to share it with.

There are two reasons for that. The first one isn’t stated here, but we see it all through the Scriptures: God created us to share his love. Notice that I say “to share his love,” not “to find someone to love.” 1 John 4 tells us that “God is love,” and there is good reason for that. We know as Christians that while God is one, he is also three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that when we speak of God we speak of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we call that the doctrine of the Trinity. That’s why it’s true to say that God is love: in himself, between the three persons of the Trinity, God loves. The Father, Son and Spirit all love each other deeply, and this was true even before anything or anyone else existed. Thus God didn’t need to find someone to love; rather, the Father, Son and Spirit loved each other and decided to create us so that God could invite us to share in that love, thus making his infinite love infinitely greater by including all of us in it.

As I said, this is not explicit in Genesis 2, but is rather something we learn from reading all of Scripture. It leads, though, to the second half of God’s reason for creating us, which is very clear in this passage: God created us to worship him. After all, that’s the purpose of a temple, right? God shares his love with us, and in so doing he calls us to respond in kind, by loving him and by acknowledging his greatness and glory; which is to say, by worshiping him, as we are doing here this morning. Worship is our first purpose in life, for it is the purpose for which we were made. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, one of the foundational documents of Presbyterian Christianity, declares that our chief purpose is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever”; and John Piper has taken that one further, declaring that we exist to glorify God by enjoying him forever.

That really is the idea here. Worship is a large and deep subject, and we could spend a long time talking about it and only scratch the surface, but at its very core, it’s simple: worship is about making our relationship with God, as a body and as individuals, our primary focus. Everything else flows from that, and any priority which gets in the way of that is a temptation to idolatry, because God created us to worship him—not just to serve him, though that’s important, not just to do certain things, but to enjoy his presence, to enjoy him and celebrate him as the great and wonderful God he is.

(Genesis 1:1-2:3; 2 Peter 3:1-10)

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the British science-fiction series Dr. Who, but there’s a scene in one of the episodes where a policeman asks the Doctor where he’s from. He’s from another planet, as it happens, but he doesn’t want to say so; instead, he responds, “I’ve always found that the best way to find out where someone is from is to find out where they’re going and work backwards.” When his interrogator asks where he’s going, the Doctor replies, “I have absolutely no idea.” I love that line, but the Doctor is in fact reversing the truth: in order to figure out where we’re going, and who we’ve become along the way, we need to figure out where we’ve come from and work forward; and to do that properly, we need to go all the way back to the beginning, to the first part of Genesis. This is why, as we begin this very important year in the life of our congregation and our country, I wanted to begin at the beginning, by spending several weeks in Genesis 1-11, and particularly in chapters 1-2.

The problem is that these days, there’s so much sniping over the first two chapters of this book, it can be hard to hear what they’re actually saying over the din. We have this argument in Western culture, you’re all familiar with it, which is usually cast as “evolution vs. creationism,” as science vs. religion—and the reason it’s usually cast that way is that that way of framing the argument insures that the folks who are opposed to the Bible and Christianity will win. Plain and simple, it’s dishonest, and it’s a cheat, and unfortunately, too many Christians play into it and thereby aid and abet those who hate our faith. More recently, you have the folks in the Intelligent Design movement—I’ve had the chance to study under a couple of them, and I appreciate their work—who are attacking evolutionary theory on its own terms, pointing out the problems with the supposed evidence and the nearly infinite odds against any such thing as evolution happening as a natural process. I believe their scientific and mathematical arguments will ultimately carry the day; but as they themselves recognize, there’s more to be said.

You see, the real debate going on here isn’t “evolution vs. creationism,” but rather evolutionism—which is, by the admission of its own high priests, a religious doctrine founded on the assertion that God cannot exist and thus that we may only accept explanations for the existence of the world which totally exclude him—vs. various doctrines of divine creation. There is no one “creationism.” You have folks like Ken Ham, the Answers in Genesis crew, the Institute for Creation Research with Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, who argue for creation in six 24-hour days, and you have folks like the Canadian astrophysicist Hugh Ross who argue that the days of Genesis 1 aren’t 24-hour periods, and thus that the scientific evidence for the age of the cosmos can be taken at face value. I’ve learned from all of them, I believe they’re all taking positions which are defensible and reasonable readings of Scripture, I think they all have contributions to make to the debate—and I really wish they’d spend more time making them and less time shooting at each other, trying to prove their position the only acceptable one.

The most important thing to get here is that this is a religious debate—on both sides. The position which argues that evolutionary theory disproves the Bible and disproves God is every bit as much religious in character and essence, it is based every bit as much on faith, as the position which argues that the Bible teaches that God created the world in a calendar week, and the more people understand that, the more they’re going to see what’s really going on in this debate.  And, just as importantly, the more clearly we see that, the more clearly we’ll understand how Genesis speaks into this debate—because it isn’t a modern debate at all, it’s just the most recent version of a fight that was just as significant back when Genesis was written.

The key to understanding that is realizing that while Genesis speaks to us, it wasn’t originally written to us. This is something that folks who want to take down the Bible don’t get, and so they pick up Genesis and treat it as if it was written by somebody with a scientific mindset to make statements of a scientific character about the creation of the world; and it wasn’t, and that’s no criticism of it. You see, science tends to ask questions about what and how—what happened, and how, by what mechanism, was it done? Valid questions, but not enough, and really not the most important questions, on the whole.  Genesis certainly doesn’t ignore the what, but it isn’t really concerned about the how; rather, its focus is on the who and the why, and its language and argument are geared to that end.

So if Genesis 1 wasn’t written to provide, in our terms, a “scientific” account of the creation of the world,* why was it written? There are several parts to that answer, but there’s one that’s most important and foundational to the rest: this passage tells us in no uncertain terms that God and only God created everything that is. We get that right from the opening statement: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” In saying this, right away, Genesis distinguishes the God of Israel from the gods of other nations in two ways.

In the first place, of course, there’s the claim that he, not they, made the world; thus the God of Israel is the only true God, and the gods of the nations are all false gods with no right to the title. Just as important, however, is the assertion that God made everything. No other god made that claim; in other religions, the gods shaped the world as we know it, but they didn’t make it—they were a part of it. Only Israel’s God claimed to have made everything that is, a point driven home in verses 14-18. To the nations around Israel, the sun and the moon were major gods, and the stars ruled people’s fortunes. Moses, in writing this passage, doesn’t even name the sun and the moon—he just calls them “the two great lights,” and throws in the stars as an afterthought. No power, no influence, no nothing—not gods of any sort, just lights, that’s all. You remember when we looked at Colossians, and Paul was talking about Jesus setting us free from the elementary powers of the world? It’s the same sort of thing here. Genesis makes the claim very clear that God is absolutely superior to every other power in this world, no exceptions, and no challengers.

Now, let’s carry this forward into our own time. For the last several years, there’s been a recurring flap over the Intelligent Design movement. When President Bush was asked for his opinion on the issue, he said that “part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” including those which challenge evolutionary dogma; from the howl that arose, you’d have thought he’d advocated book-burning. More recently, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin took a similar stance, and was ruthlessly mocked by the liberal elite—since of course (as I know well coming from Washington state) if you live west of the Mississippi and you’re not from LA or San Francisco, you’re a dumb hick by definition. In the responses to their statements, do we see a scientific openness to inquiry and new ideas? No, we don’t. Do we see rational argumentation and careful explanation of the evidence? By and large, no. Rather, what we see is the insistence that no one is allowed to challenge the dogma of godless evolutionary theory, and that anyone who does so must be shouted down as quickly as possible by any means necessary.

In other words, we don’t see a scientific theory of evolution that can be questioned and challenged and that its holders will happily throw away if the evidence doesn’t support it; rather, we see the religious doctrine of evolutionism to which its adherents are committed as a matter of faith. Put another way, we see the gods of the nations in their new form; just like the ancient pagan gods, they did not make the world, they are a part of it, and they refuse to admit the existence of anyone who did. This comes through clearly in the famous declaration by Richard Dawkins that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”; but perhaps the strongest statement on this point was made by the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin. In a review essay in the New York Review of Books, Dr. Lewontin wrote this:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

Note: “materialism” here means the belief that there is nothing but matter, no spiritual element to reality, and certainly no gods of any sort. He continues,

That materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Translation: we’ve already decided that we don’t want there to be any such person as God, and so we’ll take whatever explanations for things we can find that don’t involve him, regardless of whether we have the evidence to support those explanations or not—as he and other eminent scientists admit we don’t.

The idea of a God who might upset our nice, neat little systems—and, worse, who might have some claim on our lives—is simply too intolerable to be accepted, says Dr. Lewontin elsewhere in this article, and so they dedicate their efforts to coming up with the best answers they can that don’t require God, whether or not they are in fact sufficient, or even supported by the evidence. This is a religious position, not a scientific one; so is the definition of science held by most scientists which says that science must begin by presuming that God doesn’t exist.

 It’s this religious worldview, which uses science to prop itself up, which is the root of most of the “science vs. religion” clashes in our time. One good example is the academic temper tantrum we saw some years ago when the Cobb County, Georgia school board some years ago put a disclaimer on their textbooks saying that evolution is only a theory, not proven fact. Scientifically, it’s a completely inarguable statement; but it’s a challenge to the worldview, to the religious beliefs, of the scientific establishment, and so it got the same response that such challenges so often do: a howling mob with pitchforks and torches crying “Death to the heretics!”

It’s really the same issue now as it was when Genesis was written—who is God, the LORD or the gods of the nations?—even if the gods of the nations look very different these days; and against the religious worldview which believes in evolution in order to deny the existence of God, Genesis speaks loud and clear: God created everything that is. He has the authority over all the created world, because he is its Author, and that gives him author’s rights—which is what “authority” is—over every part of it. You can argue about how he did it, but you cannot get around the thundering heart of this passage, on which it speaks with the voice of mighty waters: in the beginning, God.

 For those like Dr. Lewontin who refuse to believe it, this must be avoided, denied, or explained away; but for those who are willing to accept it, it’s reason for praise. We praise God for the wisdom that made the world, and for the beauty which expressed itself in the beauty of creation; we praise him for the goodness of creation, marred though it is by our sin, and for the ways in which creation shows us his glory. We praise him because wherever we might go, he is there with us, guiding and caring for us. And in our praise, we summon all creation to do the same.

For the sake of brevity, I did not take time in the sermon to expand on my assertion that Genesis 1 should be read as a theological and literary text rather than a scientific one; but there are a few points worth making in that regard which may be of interest to some. The critical thing for any interpreter of Genesis 1-2 to understand is that reading it with a scientific mindset is anachronistic, because the mindset and conceptual framework of modern science did not exist in the ancient world; ancient peoples had a somewhat different set of questions and concerns, and so the focus of this text is different than it would be if it had been written by someone formed in contemporary Western culture. That doesn’t make it any less true or accurate in what it’s trying to say, but it does mean that it’s going to say it differently.

First, it doesn’t use words scientifically, but for literary effect. Thus, for instance, when we see the word “day,” we shouldn’t think, “24 hours”; after all, there wasn’t anyone standing around with a stopwatch timing God as he went about his work. This is especially true given that Genesis 2:4 refers to “the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,” which clearly doesn’t mean a literal day. The word “day” is used deliberately in Genesis 1, but not to nail creation down to six 24-hour days; the author had a different purpose, one which was directed not to instruction in astrophysics and geology but to the teaching of truth about God.

Second, Genesis isn’t structured scientifically, but for literary effect. Modern science thinks in straight lines—first this, and then that, and then that; thus when we read this chapter through scientific lenses, we naturally assume it was written in chronological order. We understand it to be telling us that God first made light, then separated the waters, then made the land appear and put plants on it, and then went back and created the sun and the moon, then birds and fish, then land animals, and then people. If you find it implausible that God would make day and night at the beginning but not create the sun and the moon until three days later, you’re not alone; but there are two good reasons to believe that this passage was never intended to be read that way. One is that the word “day” doesn’t have an article until you get to the sixth day; before that, we have, “And was evening and was morning, day one,” or “day five,” or whatever. In other words, that fourth day on which God created the sun and the moon isn’t labeled the fourth day, but a fourth day; which suggests that these events were arranged in this order not because they happened in this order (except that day six came last), but for some other reason.

That other reason is that while this order doesn’t make scientific sense, it does serve a literary purpose. Hebrew poetry and rhetoric was based on various forms of parallelism, and so the biblical authors often used that to emphasize their points; this is a classic example. As you can see, the six days break up into two groups of three which are then set in parallel to each other, and which correspond to the description of the earth at the beginning of God’s creative work as a formless void—in other words, unformed and unfilled. You’ll notice that the first three days all have to do with God giving form to the raw stuff of creation, setting boundaries to give it definition—dividing light from darkness, creating day and night; dividing the waters, separating the sky from the surface of the planet; then setting boundaries on the waters, dividing the planet into land and oceans. In this way, he creates the various “realms” or “spheres” of creation. The next three days, we’re given the filling of these realms—the sun, to rule the day, and the moon, to rule the night; the birds to fill the air and the fish and other marine animals to fill the waters; land animals to fill the continents; and, ultimately, humanity to oversee the whole thing. The passage runs this way not to say that things happened in a certain sequence, but rather to emphasize the order and logic of God’s creative work.