Gen

Gen. 1:1-2:3

2/24/2008

“God Created the Heavens and the Earth”

Before us, we have a divinely inspired record of God's creation. He could have written about it in millions of different ways. In fact, our passage is not the only place where we have the creation described or referred to, though it is admittedly the most lengthy description. So then, the way God proceeds to tell the story of His creation is as important as what He tells us, such as the simple facts that we can glean from the passage. This means that we must view what God chose to tell us and how He chose to do so against the background of how He could have done it differently. That way, we can come up with why He said what He said even if He didn't explicitly state it in so many words. Approaching today's passage with that in mind will help us know why God told the creation story in this particularly way and what significance it had for the people of Israel. Let us now touch on some of the highlights of this creation account.

This creation account begins with a declaration—in fact, God chose to begin the whole Bible with it: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It is a remarkably short, simple declaration! Yet how significant and weighty is its meaning and how profound and far-reaching are its implications! If God did not create us and our universe, what would we be other than some kind of freak, cosmic accident? We would be nothing more than some random flashes of life, which are gone as quickly as they come, signifying nothing. All the things that happen in our lives, all the joys and elation we feel, all the pain and sorrows we endure--all the “stuff” that the greatest of our literature is made of--the Oedipus Rexes and the King Lears and the Midsummer Night's Dreams and the Pride and Prejudices--all the tragedies and comedies of life that produce the deepest of pathos--[they] would amount to absolutely nothing!

But the Word of God opens up with this short, simple, almost a-matter-of-fact declaration that God created the heavens and the earth. This is certainly a testament to God's almighty power to make all things out of nothing. Just remember that simple fact should give an immeasurable, undying hope. But it is also a testament to the meaning and purpose of our existence. The very tacitness with which this monumental declaration is made seems to cry out, “Of course God made the heavens and the earth! How else could it be? This whole universe does not make sense without God. You make no sense without God!” Because God made us, we are not accidents. For God works all things according to the counsel of His most holy, wise and powerful will. We are not a result of a divine hiccup. Consciously, deliberately, purposefully God willed us and all things into existence by speaking clearly, powerfully and authoritatively.

That is why our life is not meaningless, though we are infinitesimally puny in the cosmic scale of things. We may seem like nothing more than random sparks of life--sparks that are tiny beyond recognition in comparison to the stars and the novas and the supernovas of this vast universe, which is so vast that, despite the billions and billions of the stars and galaxies, it is still so dark! But our life is not meaningless because God willed us into existence according to His deep, wise counsel, according to His sovereign will. What we experience in our life matters because God has ordained it and foreordained it! What we come to know and what we do with it matter! What we feel and what we do with it matter not only to ourselves and our loved ones but also to God because God gave us the mind to know what we know, the heart to feel what we feel and the will to do what we do! Oh, what is man that God should be mindful of us--of what we do, what we think and what we feel--when we think of the vastness of this universe and the smallness and the brevity of our life in comparison?

What is the purpose for which God created the world?

The first thing that jumps out at us is the refrain, which comes after God's daily work of creation: “God saw that it was good.” God's six days of creation climaxes with the comment, “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (v. 31). God created all things, first and foremost, for His own delight, the delight of seeing how good His creation is. We must not detect anything shady about His pursuit of pleasure. His pleasure is in the things that are good. So He made things that are good, very good. The excellence of the things He made is a reflection of His goodness, which is perfect and absolute. God is good through and through. So He can pursue His pleasure with all of His infinite zeal and passion and it will never be evil. He can never derive His pleasure in anything that is not good. For He is good. We should never be suspicious of His goodness. The sun may not rise tomorrow but God will always be good in all of His ways. Because He is good in the most absolute and perfect way, He is entitled to pursue His pleasure above all things and we can trust that it will all be good! What security and comfort this fact afford us!

We see His goodness further demonstrated by the blessings He pronounces upon the creatures. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth” (v. 22). This blessing is renewed and expanded in God's blessing upon man: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (v. 28). So we cannot fail to notice the goodness of God's creation. Imagine the amazing and marvelous sight of fish and birds and land creatures springing up into existence! Schools and schools of fish, all different in colors and shapes, moving together, sometimes slowly as in a dream, then all of a sudden changing the direction to go the other way, and dolphins jumping out of the water and whales spewing out water and air through their blow holes. Birds flying, soaring and gliding through the air. Animals running, galloping, hopping, jumping, crawling, swinging, rolling and digging. And oh, all the sounds and noises that were made and heard for the very first time! The monkeys gibbering, the asses braying, the bears growling, the bees and flies buzzing, the birds singing and chirping, the bulls bellowing, the cows mooing, the calves bleating, the cats meowing and purring, the cocks crowing, the crows cawing, the deer belling, the dogs barking, the dolphins clicking and splashing, the pigeons and doves cooing, the ducks quacking, the eagles screaming, the elephants trumpeting, the foxes yelping, the frogs croaking, the pigs squealing, the gulls squawking, the hares squeaking, the horses neighing, the lions roaring, the owls hooting, the rhinos snorting, the snake hissing, the turkeys gobbling and the wolves howling! God brings into life all kinds of vibrant life, buzzing with vigorous movements and bursting symphonies of noises! Upon this lively beginning of life on earth, God pronounces His blessings! How good and wonderful! Looking at these things, how can we doubt the goodness of the One, who made them! And this goodness of God made us “a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned [us] with glory and honor. [He has] given [us] dominion over the works of [His] hands; [He has] put all things under [our] feet” (Ps. 8:5-6). God created all things for a purpose and we know that His creation flows out of His goodness. That matters, doesn’t it? We cannot be just accidents.

At this point, let us step back and think about the original context, in which the Book of Genesis was written. God had just delivered Israel out of Egypt, where they had been slaves. He brought them to Mount Sinai and there He entered into covenant with them. And, as He promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God was about to lead them into the promised land, which was being occupied by the Canaanites. As Egypt was, so were the Canaanite nations in their religion: they worshiped many different gods. That is why God's primary concern in brining Israel into the promised land was preserving the purity of Israel's religion. That was a major reason behind God's decree to obliterate the peoples of Canaan and not spare anyone. Why? Lest they become a stumbling block and lure the people of Israel from their God. This was not an arbitrary arrangement, of course. Israel's destruction of the Canaanites would coincide precisely with their filling up the measure of their sin (Gen. 15:16): Israel would become an instrument of God's judgment upon the nations.

We can see other implications of the opening declaration, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God is the one and only true God, who created all things. In creating all things, He assigned to each its own boundaries (e.g. darkness and light, evening and morning, upper waters and the lower waters and the expanse in between, and the lower waters and the land), its proper place (e.g. the fish and sea creatures in the waters and the birds in the sky above and the land animals on the land) and its role (e.g. the sun to govern the day and the moon and the stars to govern the night and man to rule over other creatures). Although man was given the privileged role to govern other creatures, he does so as God's vicegerent under God's sovereign authority. God alone is the Creator of all things, who owns all things and rules over all. It is He rules over light and darkness. It is He rules over the sun and the moon and the stars. The mountains are His, the valleys are His, the rivers and the oceans are His as well, as the sky and the clouds, the rain and the snow and the wind and the storm are His, too. To Him belong the heavens, the earth, the seas and all that is in them, including all the nations and every individual! There is no separate god for rain and thunder, another for east wind and drought, yet another for fertility and harvest, another for death, another for healing, another for diseases, another for the Nile, another for the sun, another for the moon, etc. And God, as the sovereign Lord of all, has the right to judge the nations, as He was about to do to the Canaanite nations. Because God is the Lord of all and all-sufficient, Israel was called to worship Him and Him alone. Israel did not have to worship other gods.

We must step back even further and remember something major that happened between the creation event and God's covenant with Israel: the fall of Adam and Eve. Since the fall, the greatest need of the fallen humanity became redemption. This creates an interesting situation. The subject matter of our passage is something that happened before the fall. But this story is told to a fallen people in desperate need of redemption. As a matter of fact, what is the purpose of the Bible? It is to declare God's marvelous work of redemption. So then, even this account of creation, though the event itself took place before the fall, does more than give some generic information about God's creation of the world in a neutral way. We can expect that this account of creation is given ultimately to serve God's message of redemption.

In fact, that is exactly what we see in our passage. The opening declaration affirms beyond a shadow of the doubt the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (God creating all things out of nothing). But the rest of the account focuses on another dimension of God's creation. In v. 2 we have somewhat of a thesis statement or the organizing principle for the whole creation account implied: “the earth was without form and void....” As many have noticed, the creation account, then, proceeds to show how God's creation deals with the primordial formlessness and void. In the first three days God brings order and organization to the formlessness: on the first day God divides light from darkness, day from night; on the second day God divides the upper waters from the lower waters with the expanse in between; on the third day God divides the earth from the waters. Do you see how God is dividing and separating and organizing the universe? In the next three days God brings contents into the void: on the fourth day God places the sun and the moon and the stars in the expanse of the heavens—the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night; on the fifth day God places the birds in the sky and the fish and sea creatures in the waters; on the sixth day God placed animals and creeping creatures on the land, as well as a man and a woman.

As you can see, the creation story is presented as God overcoming the primordial condition of formlessness and void. But we get a sense that the way God's creation is presented here is not simply about the demonstration of God's almighty power in some neutral sense. Again and again, after God's daily work of creation, we have the refrain, “God saw that it was good....” Implied in that comment is that what was prior to God's creative work—namely, the condition of formlessness and void—was not good. God's creation did not just bring things into existence out of nothingness. God's creation made what was not good into what is good.

“Good”, even in Hebrew, is a very generic term, corresponding very much with the English word, “good”. Just a brief survey of how that word is used in Gen. 1-3 shows the wide range of meaning the word has. In 2:9 we read that the trees in the garden of Eden were “good” for food. The word here means “desirable” or “pleasant” or “good” in a practical sense. But in the same verse the word is also used in the context of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Here, the word has a definite moral dimension. We also read in 2:18 that it was “not good” for the man to be alone. The word “good” here cannot have a moral sense.

So what do we do? When God saw that what He made was good, what did He mean by it? The most obvious sense is an aesthetic one: what God made was good in the sense of beautiful, pleasant, delightful and even sublime. But we cannot ignore the possible moral sense of the word, especially in the light of what the Bible testifies later. In Jer. 4:23 Jeremiah uses the phrase, “without form and void”, to describe the judgment, which fell upon Judah and Jerusalem: “I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void....” Here we see God's judgment as the reversal, or the undoing, of His creation. To be without form and void, therefore, is not morally neutral in this context. But here is the amazing thing. Even as we read the utter destruction that fell upon the people of God, our hope is not lost. For God has dealt with this situation of formlessness and void before and triumphed over it! And that is the importance of the creation account in Gen. 1! It is not just about the almighty power of God to create. It is also about God's power to save. In fact, to save is to create anew. He who triumphed over the formlessness and void of the earth in the beginning will triumph over the formlessness and void of sin and death in the end!

Last and very briefly, I want to mention the supernaturalism of this passage. This is an obvious point. For what is more supernatural than the divine work of creation, which brought all things out of nothing? But there is more. The supernaturalism of this passage is not just something that established the natural order. Even after the creation of the natural realm, there continues to be a close connection between the supernatural and the natural. Having created it, God does not withdraw Himself from it. The Creator of the universe continues to be involved as the sovereign Lord of the universe. We see this in the beginning verses of ch. 2. Having created the heavens and the earth in six days, God rests on the seventh day. But He does not just rest in His heavenly abode. “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation” (2:3). This becomes the rationale for the Sabbath rest for the people of God. By this benediction and injunction God establishes a close connection between heaven and earth: what God does in heaven is to be reflected on earth: this world is heaven's shadow land. So this world’s ultimate significance, meaning and purpose is found in reflecting the heaven’s reality.

What is more, there is something unnatural (or supernatural?) about this seven-day pattern God establishes. The annual and the monthly and the daily cycle is anchored in nature: the earth circles around the sun once a year; the moon circles around the earth once a month; the earth rotates once a day. But we can find no reason for the seven-day cycle in nature. The seven-day cycle, then, is indeed a supernatural imposition on the natural: it is not anchored in any natural order or phenomenon. And we also know the primacy given to this seven-day pattern in Jewish religious calendar--the Sabbath day, the sabbatical year and the year of jubilee. Even under the new covenant, this seven-day pattern continues to exert its importance in our weekly observance of the Lord's Day.

Do you find your life meaningful? On the one hand, it is often difficult to see much significance in our life as we live from day to day, moving from one chore to another, going back and forth between our home and our work or school, feeling like we are running in the hamster wheel of daily routine, not going anywhere. So we ask, does my life amount to anything? On the other hand, we often act like all that matters in the world is our feelings, as if we were the center of the universe. So we curl up in our beds, neglecting our duties. So we lash out at others and make their lives miserable because we are feeling miserable. So we waste our time and life in mindless entertainments. So we cheat on our spouses. So we even kill others in our rage. As if what we feel is all that matters in this universe.

How do we justify such self-centered attitudes and actions when we see our life in the context of this vast universe, in which we are not even a blip? At the same time, is our life totally meaningless and because our life is without any significance, we can lash out and cheat and lie and kill and all that does not matter? We instinctively feel that there is something wrong with both approaches. And that is so because God has made us in His image and placed eternity in our hearts. That means, our significance is not from within ourselves but from God and from the significance He assigned to us. This humbles us. At the same time, it raises us far above what we reach with our efforts and talents, which come from God anyway. But whatever significance we have as the image of God, we forfeited it by turning away from God and His design for our life. And what chaos ensued! What formless and what void in our life because we have left God, in whose we have been made!

But God did not leave us alone in that miserable state! Christ, by coming into this world through incarnation, affirmed the meaningfulness of our life as God’s creatures made in His image! He who made this universe, whose fills this vast universe, walked into this planet earth, which is not even a blip in this map of universe, and He squeezed Himself into this tiny planet of ours, into this puny body of ours! Why? To stand with us. To be where we are. To bear the very misery and the pain and the sorrow and the guilty and the punishment of our sins. To walk into the formlessness and to bring order and organization, true content and true life. To walk into the void of our life and to bring the vigorous movements of life, the buzzing symphony of joyful noise. He did that by taking upon Himself our sorrow and our tears, our punishment and our death. In doing so, He affirmed our significance in this world of God. So then, our self-image is to be determined by these two wonders--the wonder of our unworthiness in ourselves and the wonder of our God-given significance. This significance comes not only from God creating us in His own image but also from God restoring and perfecting that forfeited image by sacrificing His only begotten Son on our behalf! What is more, God has predestined us for heaven as our eternal abode. In creation God spoke from heaven and retires back into heaven. But in re-creation God came down into the world and accomplished our salvation and returned back to heaven in triumph in order to bring us there to be with Him forever.

Your life is full of meaning and significance. Just the fact that God created you in His own image should be enough. But God has also created you anew through the monumental, unimaginable sacrifice of His Son. Your life matters! What you think with your mind matters! What you feel with your heart matters! What you do with your will matters! It can bring glory to God! It can bring great joy to your heart as you live out of that union with Christ! Do not waste your life in a meaningless pursuit of that things that perish. You are far too important! The blood of the eternal Son of God was shed for you. He died to give you life. And He promises the glorious heaven! Your life is too precious. Do not be content with what the world is content with. This world, this whole world, is not worthy of you. Pray in faith, therefore, that all the reality of God’s blessings upon your life may be experienced and enjoyed and lived out in your life, that God would ennoble your mind, that God would strengthen your will, that God would purify your desires by His beauty and glory, in order that your deepest longing and desire would be to be conformed to the beautiful and wonderful and majestic image of your Savior Jesus Christ. Turn away from the shameful passions of the flesh. Turn away from the shallow temptations of this world. Plunge into the grace of God. Live out of the abundance of your God and Savior and Lord until you will be perfected in glory and dwell in the new heavens and the new earth forever in your Savior’s presence!