The Course of Creation

Since this is Mother’s Day, let me start with a question: Why do so many people feel compelled to refer to Mother Nature? The same people who deny any belief in God as the Creator refer to the marvelous balance, order, and beauty of creation as being the handiwork of someone they call Mother Nature.

A journalist named Max More wrote the following letter to Mother Nature.

Dear Mother Nature:

Sorry to disturb you, but we humans—your offspring—come to you with some things to say. We want to thank you for the many wonderful qualities you have bestowed on us with your slow but massive intelligence. You have raised us from simple self-replicating chemicals to trillion-celled mammals. You have given us free rein of the planet. You have given us a life span longer than that of almost any other animal. You have endowed us with a complex brain giving us the capacity for language, reason, foresight, curiosity, and creativity. You have given us the capacity for self-understanding as well as empathy for others.

Mother Nature, truly we are grateful for what you have made us. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die—just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom. You held out on us by giving the sharpest senses to other animals. You made us functional only under narrow environmental conditions. You gave us limited memory, poor impulse control, and tribalistic, xenophobic urges. And, you forgot to give us the operating manual for ourselves!

What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed. You seem to have lost interest in our further evolution some 100,000 years ago. Or perhaps you have been biding your time, waiting for us to take the next step ourselves. Either way, we have reached our childhood’s end.

And on it goes. The book of Genesis presents a completely different view. It states in clear and simple terms that God created life, nature, the biosphere, the world, the solar system, and the universe, and that God is…

• Personal

• Purposeful

• Powerful

That is the key message of Genesis chapter 1.

The universe and life on planet earth are not merely the by-products of random impersonal physical and chemical forces operating in nature without any direction or purpose. God deliberately and intentionally made us, and all that exists around us. And that is an incredibly important fact – a fact with implications for who we are and how we live as human beings.

That’s why Genesis 1 is one of the most important chapters of the whole Bible. And yet it is a chapter that is grossly misunderstood and misused by both Christians and non-Christians. It is almost as though someone who didn’t want us to understand and appreciate the truth of this chapter has tried to skew our thinking about it, and warp our understanding of it, and rob our appreciation of the amazing things that are described here.

People generally take one of two approaches to the first chapter of Genesis.

1. They ignore it. They say that it is just a quaint old myth about how the world supposedly began. A myth that is hopelessly out of touch with the findings of modern science. Such people have very little regard for Gen. 1 because they simply don’t believe it.

2. Another group of people believe that Genesis 1 is true, but then they try to use Genesis 1 to develop a particular scientific understanding about HOW creation happened, and WHEN it happened. They try to derive from Genesis 1 certain scientific information in order to support their particular view of origins. These people tend to get so wrapped up in their arguments and counter-arguments that they end up missing the majesty and the wonder of the passage.

So the first group believes that Genesis 1 says nothing, and the second group believes that Genesis 1 says more than it actually says.

Q. So what is the real purpose of the Genesis 1 creation account?

Its purpose is to tell us that God made us, he made this incredible planet we live on, he made the awesome universe all around us, and that this Creator God therefore needs to be part of our personal reality. We cannot understand life, or live life, without taking him into account, because He is all-important to us.

In that sense, you might say that Genesis 1 is really more about our present and our future than about our past. Some people want to turn Genesis into a history textbook or a science textbook. It is neither. That is not the way the original readers understood it 3,500 years ago, and it is certainly not the way we should understand it today. Genesis certainly deals with matters of history and science, and when it does so, it does so accurately. But those subjects are not the main point of the book.

God did not give us Genesis 1 to satisfy our scientific curiosity anymore than Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to serve as a textbook on the politics of 16^(th) century Scotland. There is a much larger purpose to it!

Genesis is really a devotional manual that helps us to worship the personal Creator God who made us. It tells us how we got here for the purpose of telling us where we need to go from here in our spiritual lives in relation to God.

The first thing you notice when you read Genesis 1 is that it is rather highly stylized prose. It isn’t quite poetry, but it is certainly more than just a pedestrian report of something that happened. The literary structure is quite obvious. There are patterns that are repeated over and over again, as though there are key ideas that need to be emphasized and re-emphasized, and then remembered.

The creation account unfolds over six magnificent days, with the seventh day marking the completion – seven being the number of perfection in the Bible. Each day contains unique content, but each day is presented in a similar format, with recurring words and phrases. This literary structure serves to link the days together; they are not disjointed, nor meant to be understood on their own; they are each part of a larger progression.

And the repeating elements give the passage a kind of stately pace – like a majestic royal procession going down the aisle of Westminster Abbey. I’m convinced that there is as much truth in the literary structure of this passage as there is in the actual words themselves. So let’s have a look at the pattern of Genesis 1 to see what we can learn.

1. Declaration: On each day, God speaks. A declaration is a formal statement of how things are, or how things are going to be. For example, back in 1776, the Americans made a Declaration of Independence – they stated their intent to separate from Great Britain.

When you’ve been out of the country and you return to Canada, you pass through Customs and you have to make a formal declaration of the goods you are bringing into the country. It’s an official statement.

At the beginning of every day of creation, we see God making a declaration: “And God said…” We keep reading that statement: “And God said…” That’s the driving force that moves the whole creation story. “And God said…”

On some of the days, God made a further declaration. Days 3, 5, and 6 are like that. Why? Because those are the days in which God created life—the vegetation on the Third Day; birds and fish on the Fifth Day; animals and man on the Sixth Day. In fact, God spoke more on the Sixth Day than on any other day. Day 6 was very special.

What are we to make of all these declarations of God? Well, it is quite obvious. The Bible teaches that the word of God is the activating force that brings into being all that exists. Every time God speaks, something new and wonderful comes into being. Where there was once emptiness, now there is life and light.

This is so different from other ancient accounts of origins. In the Babylonian myths, in the Hindu accounts, the god or gods must do something, they must perform some strenuous action. And they usually they do it using something that already exists. In the Bible, God merely speaks – and where there was nothing, now there is something.

This repeated declaring tells us something very important about God: He speaks. He communicates. He is intelligent. He is a personal being who has something to say.

We read in John 1:1…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

God’s will, as expressed through his Word, is so powerful that it cannot be thwarted. The Bible nails this fact down on the very first page.

Do you recognize God as one who speaks? Our creator is also a communicator. We hold in our hands the written word of God. It is his love letter to us. It is a declaration of love, of concern, of care. And God’s Word still has the same power that it did at Creation—the power to bring life and light into our lives.

2. Another thing we see repeated throughout the days of creation is a statement of confirmation.

• On the First Day, God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

• On the Second Day (v. 6), God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so.

• On the Third Day (v.9), God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so.

And we see this pattern over and over again. God spoke, something happened, and it was confirmed; it happened; it was so. Where once there was nothing, now there was something. There was a new reality that was brought into being by God’s Word.

This tells us that God’s word is incredibly powerful. A person’s words can express their thoughts, their will, or their emotions. Here, God expresses his will – and all he has to do is say the word, and a whole universe comes into being. His word is powerful, productive, and purposeful.

Throughout this account, we see a repeated evaluation. God looked at what he made and he saw that it was good.

• v. 4 - God saw that the light was good.

• v. 10 - He saw that the dry ground and the oceans were good

• v. 12 - He saw that the plants and the trees were good

Over and over again, God saw that his creative handiwork was good.

This tells us that God is a moral being. He likes what is good. And when he does something, when he creates something, it is good. He doesn’t make bad things. Everything he does is good.

So that tells me two things:

1. This God who made me is a God who is good. He’s interested in good. “Good-ness” is his trademark.

2. Since he made me, I am a good work of God. I have worth as a human being. Now Genesis 3 tells us that the good in us has been despoiled, but the rest of the Bible tells how God steps in to recover that “goodness”.

These things are good to know, because if I’m going to enter into a personal relationship with God; if I’m going to let him get involved in my life, it’s good to know that he’s GOOD! I don’t have to be afraid of him. I don’t have to wonder if he’s going to hurt me or destroy me. Because he’s GOOD! I can trust him.

And if I’m going to have a proper view of myself, it’s important to know that God did a good thing when he created me. I have infinite worth in His sight as a human being. A lot of people have lost sight of this, and so they hate themselves and they hate other human beings.

In Genesis 1-2, there was only one thing that God evaluated to be “not good”. It is in Genesis 2:18, where God looked at Adam, and saw that he was all alone, and God said “That is not good. It is not good for the man to be alone.” So he immediately remedied that “not-good” situation by creating an amazing good—he created a woman. Women – you are God’s remedy to the first problem in the world. You are God’s remedy to man’s loneliness.

So Genesis 1 teaches us that God, our Creator, is good. And whatever he makes is good. Everything he does is good.

You see how that provides a moral framework for everything that follows? I need to treat my fellow human beings with respect and dignity because God made them and therefore they are good. I need to have a proper respect for creation itself because God made it and it is good.

The evil one tries very hard to convince us that God is NOT good. We are going to see in a few weeks when we get to chapter 3, that Satan’s temptation of Eve focused entirely on getting her to believe that what God had done was NOT good – was not the best thing he could have done for her.

But the Bible teaches us that God is good – and that is another fundamental truth we need to get nailed down in our lives. Because if we believe that God is good, then we can go through any trial, any circumstance, any hardship, knowing by faith that God is ultimately going to bring something good out of it.

Are you convinced of that today? Do you believe that God can take that problem you are wrestling with and make something good out of it?

4. Another thing we see throughout this passage is God involved in organization. And this organization is expressed in the verb “to separate”. It means to distinguish between one thing and another.

• On Day 1, God separated the light from the darkness.

• On Day 2, he separated the water in the atmosphere from the water on earth.

• On Day 3, he separated the continents from the oceans.

• On Day 4, he separated the day from the night by placing the sun, moon, and stars in place.

You know what this tells us? It tells us that God has a penchant for organizing things! He puts this over here and that over there because he’s got a unique purpose for them. He separates and distinguishes between things so that they might realize their distinct purpose.

When God created life, he separated the various plants and animals according to their kinds. There is a separation, an organization, along species lines. You don’t see an indiscriminate blurring of the species lines in either the plant or the animal kingdom.

This, by the way, is one of the great discrepancies in the Theory of Evolution. If the theory of evolution were true, we ought to see millions of examples of one species evolving into another. We ought to see halfway forms, transitional forms – apes evolving into human beings, reptiles evolving into birds, pigs evolving into whales.

But we don’t see that, either today in the present, or in the fossil record. What we DO see are distinct species that have their own identity, that are strictly separated from other species—we don’t see transitional forms overlapping between them.

When you try to cross-breed different species – even fairly similar species, like horses and donkeys, for example – it leads to a dead end – a mule is sterile and cannot reproduce

This rule of separation that is inherent in creation teaches us that God is a God of order. He delights in bringing organization and variety and uniqueness into being. Each thing he creates has a specific purpose, a specific identity, and he has designed it to fulfill that purpose.

5. Another thing we notice in this chapter is a repeated identification. God does a lot of naming throughout the days of creation. Everything that God created, he gave a name.

• He called the light “day” and the darkness he called “night”.

• He called the expanse between the waters “sky”.

• He called the dry ground “land”, and the gathered waters “seas”.

God gave everything its own identity; everything got a name.

The act of naming is of great significance in the Bible, because it indicates a relationship of care, love, and authority. The father gave his child a name—and in BIble times, those names were carefully chosen. In the very act of naming his child, that father would affirm the relationship, the sense of belonging and attachment, that existed between himself and his child.

This is why several important Bible characters got re-named by God. Abram became Abraham. Sarai became Sarah. Jacob became Israel. Simon became Peter. Saul became Paul. This renaming happened to show God’s ownership of these people. There was a close, intimate relationship between those individuals and God which was reflected in the new name that God gave them.

So this naming that God does during the week of creation is highly significant. It shows that he cares about his creation – and not just the animate part of it, but the inanimate too. The universe belongs to him. He doesn’t just wind it up and go away. God isn’t an absentee landlord. There is an ongoing relationship between the creator and that which he has created.

Now you may have noticed that God didn’t go ahead and give names to the fish, the birds, and the animals. He didn’t name them, because in chapter 2, he intended for Adam to do that. He was going to allow Adam to participate in ruling over creation with him in the naming of the creatures. It’s a beautiful picture – a picture of partnership. Man bears the image of God, so God lets him share in his authority over creation, but also in his responsibility to care for creation. Genesis is the very first environmentally-sensitive book ever written.

6. There is a sense of progression in Genesis 1. As you read through it, you sense that you are moving to a climax.

This comes through in the actual number of words. Look at the length of the description of each day. As you move through the week, the description of each day gets longer than the day before. It’s like we’re climbing a mountain. In our NIV Bible,

• Day 1 - 48 words

• Day 2 - 53 words

• Day 3 - 115 words

• Day 4 - 125 words

• Day 5 breaks the pattern - it drops back to 99 words, but that’s because it is the pause before the great climax of…

• Day 6 - 276 words

We notice the same thing with God’s speeches in Genesis 1. God doesn’t talk much at the beginning of the week. On the First Day, he only says “Let there be light”. He says a little more on the Second Day. Then on the Third Day, he speaks twice—and that day is foreshadowing and getting ready for what’s going to happen on the Sixth Day.

On the Fourth Day, God says a little more. On the Fifth Day, he again speaks twice. Then on the Sixth Day, he says a whole lot. He speaks 3 separate times—to create animals; to create man; and then to give the creation mandate.

As a piece of literature, this creation story has been deliberately and carefully crafted to lead us to a climax on Day 6, when God created man. There is a building anticipation—and then finally, it happens.

This structure tells us that we are extremely significant in God’s sight. God crafted all of creation to prepare for our arrival. The whole creation account leads up to our appearance on the scene, made in the very image of God.

That means that there is a reason for us to be here. We are not the product of millions of years of blind evolution—we are the deliberate handiwork of God. And we’re going to look more at that next week, as we study man and woman as the Crown of Creation.

7. A final thing that we notice throughout Gen. 1 is that there is a statement of conclusion at the end of every day. We read at the end of each day’s work: “And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.”

You say “Wait a minute – that’s backwards!” But remember that the children of Israel always regarded a day to begin in the evening. The Sabbath day always began on Friday night at sundown.

OK, but so what? What does this statement of conclusion teach us?

It teaches us that God’s work on each day is complete. There is a definite conclusion. Things are not carried over into the next day—there are no loose ends left untied. And at the end of the story, there is a very definite conclusion.

Genesis 2:2 On the seventh day God rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

This tells us that creation is complete – it’s not still evolving; it’s not still a work in progress.

In Genesis 1, we see these significant elements repeated:

1. Declaration – and God said

2. Confirmation – and it was so

3. Evaluation – and it was good

4. Organization – and God separated things

5. Identification – and God named things

6. Progression – and it all builds up to the creation of man

7. Conclusion – and then God rested

And we lose sight of these majestic truths if we try to turn Genesis 1 into a science textbook. The message of Genesis 1 is that the Great Creator—the one who is responsible for all this—is someone to be reckoned with.

He took the trouble to make us in his own image. He built a beautiful planet teeming with life for us to call home. He created an enormous universe for us to explore. He must care about us very much to have done that.

And that is the point of Genesis 1. The One who Made us continues to Care about us. The Creator cares! And indeed, the rest of the Bible shows just how much he cares.