In the Beginning
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Joel Brooks:would, turn in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 1.
Speaker 1:In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good.
Speaker 1:And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness, he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. And God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse, and it was so.
Speaker 1:And God called the expanse, heaven. And there was evening, and there was morning, the second day. And God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together, he called seas.
Speaker 1:And God saw that it was good. And God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth, and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind, And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.
Speaker 1:And let them be for signs and for seasons and for days years. And let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made the 2 great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.
Speaker 1:And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the 4th day. And And there was evening and there was morning, the 4th day. And God said, let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.
Speaker 1:And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning, the 5th day. And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so.
Speaker 1:And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. Then God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them, and God blessed them.
Speaker 1:And God said to them, 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. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Speaker 1:And there was evening, and there was morning, the 6th day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the 7th day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the 7th day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the 7th day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. This is the word of the Lord.
Joel Brooks:Thanks be to God. If you would, pray with me. Almighty God, we see here that when your word goes forth, it does not return void. And so our hope, our expectation tonight is that through your Spirit, your word would go forth and accomplish what you desire it to accomplish. The hardened hearts that are here that need to be broken, I pray that your word would shatter them like a hammer shattering a rock.
Joel Brooks:For those who need to be restored, may your spirit gently blow on their hearts. May there be a spirit of repentance and forgiveness, and restoration. God, have your way. However you choose to work, have your way in our midst. I pray that my words now would fall to the ground and blow away, and not be remembered anymore, but Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us.
Joel Brooks:We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. Tonight, we begin a new series, that is likely going to take us at least into February, possibly in the part of March, with a little break around Christmas. And one of the things we're gonna do a little different about this series is because a study on Genesis is likely gonna raise a lot of questions is after, each service, I'm gonna go back there towards where the coffee is for just a time of Q and A. If any of you have questions, things we didn't talk about in the text, or questions that rose up from the text that you want to be addressed, just come afterwards.
Joel Brooks:And I'm going to hang out there until the last of you leave, and follow me to my car or whatever it is. Shoot me all the emails you want. The reason we're giving so much time to the book of Genesis is it lays the foundation for for the rest of the Bible. If you do not have a knowledge and understanding of what's happening in Genesis, you're simply not gonna understand the rest of the Bible. And I'm not just talking about the old testament.
Joel Brooks:You, in particular, won't understand the new testament. And actually, in many ways, Genesis seems like it belongs in the New Testament. The themes that are there, the the themes of Adam and Eve, marriage, the garden, the serpent, the tree of life, Noah and the flood, the faith of Abraham, all of those things will not later be discussed in the Old Testament. You're they'll be introduced here, but they'll be discussed in full once you get to the new. And so you need to have a correct understanding of these things, and really to understand the gospel.
Joel Brooks:Ultimately, we're going to see that Jesus is the centerpiece of even Genesis. That even in the very first chapter, even through the whole book of Genesis, clearly speaks about Jesus. One of the things that I thought was interesting, if you go to several atheistic websites, which is, you know, what I'll do in my spare time. I'll go to atheistic websites, and a number of their arguments, against why you can't believe the Bible or you can't believe Jesus is because Jesus says in John chapter 5, that Moses speaks of me. Says Moses speaks of me.
Joel Brooks:And Moses who who wrote Genesis, people are gonna go back to Genesis and be like, there's you'll never find the name Jesus in Genesis. So therefore, either the Bible is wrong or Jesus is wrong. And arguments like that just show that there's a a lack of understanding about what the bible really teaches. Now the bible really is an unbroken love story, all about the creation of this world, the fall of this world, and how Jesus brings the redemption of this world. And how you can, we will, over the next 20 something weeks, clearly see Jesus even in Genesis.
Joel Brooks:Let's get started. One of the things that you do before studying any book is you need to know who the author is, to whom it was written, why it was written. And we need to do the same with this book. Genesis is not, despite what you might have been taught, it is not an abstract statement about the origin of the universe. That's that's not what it is.
Joel Brooks:And if you read it as such, you're gonna greatly misunderstand all that Genesis has to offer us. It was not written in a vacuum. Moses wrote this book along with 4 other books, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, that we call the Pentateuch. He wrote those 5 books while Israel was in the desert. If you remember, for 400 years, the Israelites had been oppressed.
Joel Brooks:They had been enslaved by Egypt. God had delivered them. He had the 10 plagues. He had the Red Sea. They they left.
Joel Brooks:They got the law at Mount Sinai, and they were heading to the promised land, and then they sinned, and God punished them to 40 years of wandering in the desert. 40 years of pretty much just killing time, and it's in this time that Moses writes Genesis. And so it's written to a people who have very little understanding of god. It's a people who, up to this point in their lives, have only known a world filled with hostility, a world filled with evil, a world that was violent towards them. The Hebrews were a people at this point who didn't understand what their purpose was in the world.
Joel Brooks:Why did they exist? Did they even have a purpose? They they were a people who had fed the felt the full effects of sin. They have felt the full effects of the curse. But they couldn't explain why these things were so.
Joel Brooks:They didn't know if the things would ever change. Is this just the way the world is? And and all these are the questions that they have percolating around in their heads, and Genesis was written to them. Saying that no things have not always been so. And yes, you can actually trust this God at his word when he says, I'm gonna take you into the promised land.
Joel Brooks:You can trust him. Let me tell you about what happens when God speaks. Let me tell you about a time when the world was not this way. Let me tell you why there is evil, why there is suffering in this world. Let me tell you why God has called you out of darkness and into light.
Joel Brooks:What God is forming in you, creating a new people. Let me tell you about those things. That's why Genesis is written. So when you understand to whom this whom this book is written to, you begin to understand the purpose of why it is written. It's not a science book that we're supposed to open up in order to to find out how old the Earth is.
Joel Brooks:That's that's not the purpose of this book. The the Israelites wandering around in the desert did not really care about the age of the earth. That wasn't one of their primary concerns. They they had other questions. They weren't picking up rocks, cracking them open, and saying, you know, how old do you think this place is?
Joel Brooks:That's not what was going on there. I'm not saying that you cannot glean science from Genesis. I'm not saying that at all. But I am saying saying that you need to understand the purpose to which Genesis was written. And if you don't, you're going to be deeply frustrated because you're going to ask questions of Genesis that Genesis has no desire to answer, and it could be a very frustrating experience.
Joel Brooks:For me, this is a comfort because a lot of the questions I still have concerning my life, questions I think you probably have, are questions that Genesis addresses. Things like, why is there evil and suffering? What is my purpose in this world? Is there a God? Is he in control?
Joel Brooks:Those are good questions I think people still have. Now, another question besides just to whom the people whom this is written to is, what type of book is Genesis, or what is its genre, I guess you could say, Because the Bible is full of different genres. We read the Psalms different than we would read a gospel, or 1st Kings or something like that. When we read the Psalms, we understand that this is poetry, that these are songs, and so we we read them as such. So when we come to Psalm 33, which says, the Lord is a shield about me.
Joel Brooks:We don't believe that the lord is actually a shield. We believe that since this is a song, since this is a poem, they're using metaphor to teach us something. So we have that genre. And so when we come up with statements in the Psalms like wings of the wind or windows of heaven, Because we have observed the world, and we we kinda know how things work. We can we can look at that and and say, that's not literal.
Joel Brooks:That's metaphor. We can see that, and we can interpret that, because we know that the wind really does not have wings. You go to 1st or second kings, or you go to a gospel, and you're going to get something called historical narrative, which is when you tell a story literally. You you tell it. You're just describing the events as they happened.
Joel Brooks:And so you'll read those books in that light. And so you come to Genesis, and there's other genres out there. But what is Genesis? And that's a tough question to answer it, exactly what is Genesis, because you're going to see at times, poetical elements. Then you're gonna see, at times, historical narratives.
Joel Brooks:It's a it's a very unusual book. And so so which is it? For instance, look at the the section we just read, Genesis 1 all the way through chapter 23. This is structured like a poem, a beautiful poem. It's a complex poem.
Joel Brooks:You're gonna find all of these rhetorical patterns. You're gonna find lots of repetition. For instance, in every day of creation, you're gonna find these phrases. You're gonna find the phrase, and God said, or the phrase, and God called, and the phrase, and there was evening, and there was morning. And so it has this rhythm to it as you're going through it.
Joel Brooks:It's it's almost liturgical. It reads like a poem or perhaps a hymn with these common refrains. And there was evening, and there was morning, and there was this day. It gets actually very complex when you begin looking at how the author structures certain words. And without going into the minutiae of all this, just I find this fascinating.
Joel Brooks:Let me just give you a couple of snippets. Is that a word? Snippets. There we go. In chapter 1, everything is grouped into sections of 10 or sections of 7.
Joel Brooks:Everything. And so those are the numbers of completion or perfection. And so you're gonna find things like this. The phrase, and god said, you're gonna find that 10 times. And it was so 7 times, and god made 7 times.
Joel Brooks:God saw that it was good 7 times. You're gonna find the namings and the blessings of god all mentioned 7 times. The the altar's being very intentional in laying this out. And then when you come to things like the 7th day of creation, beginning in chapter 2, the the author, he goes nuts, because he wants you to know that this is the completely perfect end to all of creation. And so you're going to find in that block there, 35 words, which is divisible by 7.
Joel Brooks:And you're gonna find 3 clauses, each of those clauses with 7 words. And in the middle of those 7 words is the word 7. I mean, it's just you can keep going on. It's incredibly complex. And you begin to think as you're looking at this that perhaps Moses had a little help in in putting it together.
Joel Brooks:Perhaps there was a little divine inspiration there. And there's just layer after layer. But it can read like a poem, structured like 1. But then we come to Genesis 2 After beginning in verse 4 and on, this does not at all read like poetry. This reads like a historical narrative.
Joel Brooks:This is like the author is just explaining things as they happened. You don't find any of these repetitions. You don't find any of these complex word orders. There's no number significances there. He's just describing things as they unfold.
Joel Brooks:And so when you come to the creation story, you really don't know what you got. You you've got this mix. You've got this mix of poetry. You've got this mix of historical narrative. And and I say this just so you know that when we're looking at it, you need to be extremely gracious in how you interpret these opening chapters of Genesis.
Joel Brooks:When we come to the word, you know, I was asked this even right before I was coming to preach. Somebody said, are you gonna preach a 24 hour day or not? You know, the burn the burning question. The Hebrew word, yom, for day, does it mean 24 hours, or does it not? Was the word is it a young earth, or is it an old earth?
Joel Brooks:You know what? Be gracious. I mean, I grew up in a church in which we bring in speakers. We'd have revival services, and for hours, they would pound. Oh, you know, the earth 24 hour days, and they would demonize anybody who did not believe that.
Joel Brooks:And I just say, have grace. I know good Bible scholars who were faithful to the Bible, and they've come on both sides of that. Remember, you're a sinner saved by grace. Alright? And so we need to be a little flexible in other people's views, a little generous and gracious.
Joel Brooks:I think for me, when when I look at Genesis, the best way that helps me understand Genesis is to think of it as a painting and not a picture. It's a painting and not a picture, and this is actually how the great scholar, Hebrew scholar, Derek Kidner, whose Genesis commentary back there, it's a small one, and it's the one I go to over and over. It's at the book table if you want to get that. But that's how he describes it. You know, you see it as a painting, not a picture.
Joel Brooks:And he says, a painting is powerful. It's powerful because not because it reveals everything. It doesn't reveal everything. It but it really highlights certain things. It boldly puts forward certain things, and and in that, that's where you get the power of a painting.
Joel Brooks:And we see that here. God has not revealed everything to us in these opening chapters. He hasn't gone into all the minutia of all the signs and all that stuff. He hasn't. It's a painting.
Joel Brooks:He's telling us the things we need to know to powerfully present who he is. I realize that's somewhat of a long introduction. We haven't even started the text yet. I I for a while, I thought about preaching 2 weeks on Genesis 1 1, but but we're gonna start speeding up a little bit. We might get through verse 3.
Joel Brooks:So let's go to to chapter 1 verse 1 and read that again. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God is rightly the subject of the very first verse in the Bible. Because God is the one who has always been there. God was not created.
Joel Brooks:God did not somehow come into being. He's always been. And so you have, in the beginning, god. He's the constant, and and the implications of this one opening statement are enormous. We worship a God who does not owe his existence to anyone.
Joel Brooks:Nothing has a power over him. Everything that has come into being, has come into being through him. All of matter, all of life is due to God. And I want you to notice that God does not take time to argue for his existence. It doesn't say, let me give you the arguments, you know, explaining why I am.
Joel Brooks:He doesn't take time. He's not interested in apologetics here. He simply says, in the beginning, there's me. There is God. He's not concerned about defending himself.
Joel Brooks:He has been you go back a 1000000 years, a 1000000 years, a 1000000000 years, and a 1000000000 years, and you keep going, god's there. He's not worried about the, you know, the the trend or the fad of the day, or when some atheist quote comes in the paper. He's not trembling about that. He's always been. So he just states it.
Joel Brooks:And what this opening verse means for us, for all of us here in this room is because there is a creator, we have a purpose. Only things that are created have a purpose. Things that just kind of happen. Things that are accidentally come into being have no purpose. But because we know god has created us, we know that we are created for a reason, and we are going to go and look at that a lot more next week when we look in particular the creation of man.
Joel Brooks:One of the other things we see in these opening few verses here is that, in the beginning, there was God, and God has always existed in relationship with Himself, which is a pretty confusing thing. Before Caroline was being baptized, last week, I was just kinda talking through her some different things, and I and I asked, okay, Caroline, who is Jesus? And she said, well, Jesus is the son of God. I was like, really? That's good.
Joel Brooks:And I was about to move on, and she goes, but, but he's also god. And the Holy Spirit's also god, but they're all different daddy, I don't know how that works. I don't know. I was like, well, actually, you did a great job explaining that. Yes.
Joel Brooks:God exists in 3 persons, but he's one god. And we see that here. We see hints of that here. You you see, god the father, you know, in the beginning, god, he created the heavens and the earth. Look at verse 2.
Joel Brooks:You see the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. In verse 3, you see the word of God. Let there be light. And we know from John's gospel that the word of God is Jesus. Go to go to John chapter 1.
Joel Brooks:John chapter 1. We have these words, in the beginning was the word. We just read in the beginning was god, so this word must be god. But then it says, and the word was with god, and the word was god. He was in the beginning with god.
Joel Brooks:All things were made through him, and without him was not anything that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And later, we read that this word became flesh became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. And so right here, we we already see this trinity that god has always existed as 3 persons, and you get it hinted there.
Joel Brooks:Now usually, when people discuss the trinity, as you know, it's the big theological doctrinal statement, and there's all these, you know, big fancy Greek words you go through, and and most people, they get into the minutia of that, but rarely have I heard a preacher talk about the implications of that for us. What's the implications of of worshiping a triune god? A god that's always existed in relationship, in which god the father has always eternally loved the son, loved the Holy Spirit, and god the son has always eternally loved the father and the spirit, and god the spirit is forever eternally loved The father and the son. What is what does that mean for us? One of the things it means is that love, relationship is a part of God.
Joel Brooks:That love has been there from the beginning. Which is why John could later say, God is love. God exists in perfect relationship, loving relationship with each of the persons. And so, one of the ultimate realities of the universe is simply love. And and I don't know about you, but for me, that helps make sense of a lot of things in my life.
Joel Brooks:Because when my life begins to break down at times, I realize a lot of it is because I'm trying to grab for power, or I'm I'm I'm trying, you know, to grab for respect. I'm trying to grab for all these different things. And love and relationship is not what I hold as primary. All of this here that we've looked at would have been a huge comfort to the Israelites. Hopefully, it's a huge comfort to you to know that things don't just happen, but there is a god who's created everything.
Joel Brooks:Created it for a purpose, and this god is loving. That love and relationships are a a ultimate reality in the universe. That would've been a very comforting thought here. Especially concerning all the creation stories that were going around at this time. When the Israelites were wandering through the the wilderness, there were a lot of other creation stories, but it usually was all these gods fighting with one another.
Joel Brooks:Man's created by accident, or man is created to be slaves. But the universe would be created out of violence, often out of hatred. But here it's a God of love. Creation with a purpose. We see this love of God at work in his very first command.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 2. Says the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. So in verse 2, here we see that the earth is without form. It's without void. A lot of people think something happened between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.
Joel Brooks:You have Genesis 1. God's creating the heavens and the universe, but now you have somehow, you have this this formless and void and this dark world, this matter. A lot of people think that's when, you know, Satan rebelled and there was judgment against Satan or the world was being punished, or judgment had happened. We're not really sure. But at this state, the world looks worthless.
Joel Brooks:Chaos is ruling. But the hope is, the spirit of God is there and he's hovering. And that word for hovering, it's a, it's a beautiful word. It's, some of your translations might say fluttering. It's when a a mother bird would would would flutter over her nest and over her young.
Joel Brooks:It's that rapid wing movement of just kind of hovering over in a loving way. God's doing that over this earth. It's a comforting image. And then God says, let there be light. And so the very first thing that God does is he takes on the darkness.
Joel Brooks:He takes on the darkness. And throughout scripture, darkness is almost always used as a picture of evil. And so in his first creative act here, he dispels that darkness with a word. All God has to do is speak, and it comes into being. He doesn't get out a hammer and a chisel and, you know, start working.
Joel Brooks:There there was no hammer. There was no chisel. He simply speaks. And it is so. I I I love how my girls' children's Bible, one of the Bibles that they use, how it goes through the story, says God simply goes, Hello, light.
Joel Brooks:And there was light. Hello, land. And there was land. He just kind of speaks, and it comes into being. And notice exactly what he says.
Joel Brooks:Let there be light. He doesn't say, I command there to be light. He doesn't say, be light. He says, let there be light. It's kind of a celebration going on there.
Joel Brooks:It it it's almost like we would say, you know, let's have a party. And there's this this joining in almost, this joyful act. There's a delight behind this command. Another famous Hebrew scholar, Walter Brueggemann, he he says this, Says that by saying let be instead of must be, God here is demonstrating a gracious life giving power, instead of a tyrannical, oppressive one. And so I want you to see behind these words that there is this joy.
Joel Brooks:Let there be light. One could even say, at this moment, that in god's presence, as his presence of here, there is now becoming the fullness or the completion of joy. There is both joy in the Creator, and there is joy in the created at this moment. Well, we see from these spoken words, as we just read in John chapter 1, that these words speak of Jesus, because Jesus is the word of God. Jesus was there from the beginning.
Joel Brooks:All things were created through Him. Hebrews says that He sustains everything by the power of His word. It was Jesus who brought everything into existence, the Son of God bringing everything into existence. It was the Son of God who took on the darkness. And what we need to see here is that this is not the only time that the son of god takes on darkness.
Joel Brooks:And you know, we I've I've labeled this series the creative and the redemptive word of god. And so you have here the creative word of god. Later, we see the redemptive word of god. Later, the son of God takes on darkness again. Because after this perfect creation, the world falls.
Joel Brooks:Evil once again floods this world, and darkness has to be removed. And we see at the death of Jesus, you know, the gospels, they all tell of this. And when Jesus was on the cross, it says darkness covered the land. Darkness covered. At midday, the land became as dark as night, and what you see is now the son of god once again taking on the darkness, taking on the
Jeffrey Heine:evil to expel it. And through his death and his resurrection,
Joel Brooks:creation. It begins to break forward. So when he cries out, it is finished, and he dies, once again, he fights off the darkness and it is removed. And we can experience that in part now, someday we will experience that in full. One of my favorite passages in scripture is in Revelation 22, which speaks of the day we will experience this in full.
Joel Brooks:And it says this, and night will be no more. We will need no light of lamp. We will not need the sun. For the Lord God will be our light, and we will reign forever and ever.
