So here’s the question: Can you really believe what the Bible says about creation?
Many people today dismiss what the Bible says about creation. It’s out of date. It comes from a pre-scientific era. We wouldn’t read a 3000-year old document for advice on medical matters, or to learn about civil engineering. Modern science has explained our origins. So why would we read an even older book to learn about them?
And how about how we take care of our planet? We don’t need the Bible to do that, do we?
Actually, the Bible has quite a lot to tell us.
I don’t know if any of you have been watching the BBC’s Stargazing Live series. On Wednesday, during the Back to Earth half of the programme, Professor Brian Cox expressed the limits of what astronomy can find out, and how it would be nice to answer the questions that go too far back for science. Here’s what he said about the big bang: “It’s unsatisfactory. Just saying that space and time began at that point, and you’re not allowed to ask questions like what happened before. Are we to really believe, or do we really believe, that that really is the situation, that there’s no cause for this thing? Or could it be that there’s a cause for the big bang? Could it be that the universe really is tricking us by the observations we make?”
None of the advances of science have pushed God out. In fact, we need to hear what God has to say about creation more than ever.
Which brings us to Genesis chapter 1, the very first chapter of the Bible. And this morning we’re going to ask what it has to say about how the world came into being, and how this impacts our lives today.
Evolution, 6 days, or what?
Before we can do that, however, there’s some ground we need to clear out of the way. Genesis chapter 1 is one of those chapters of the Bible that gets some people all stewed up, and if we’re not careful we spend our time getting anxious which then means we never actually listen to what this chapter is saying.
So let’s clear the ground a little, so that we can listen.
The reason people get stewed up is because of the debate about what this chapter says about how the world came into being. If it wasn’t for the fact that some people feel so strongly I’d move straight on, because this chapter was not written to give us a scientific account of how.
Let me say a few brief things. The two most popular views people hold are to say that the world was made in 6 days, 6 periods of 24 hours, exactly as described here, or that the world came about by the process of evolution that Darwin described.
Who’s right? The problem is that although people’s views fall into those two camps, there are lots of ways to put flesh on the bones. If you meet someone who holds a particular view on this, you need to spend some time talking with them to find out what they actually think.
So there are some irresponsible ways to hold either of those positions. The person who believes in macro-evolution, but does so in such a way that the whole thing is a big game of chance and God had absolutely nothing to do with it has to be wrong. The whole Bible rules that out, never mind Genesis 1. But equally, the person who believes in 6-day creation, but does so in such a way that the whole of modern science is discarded, and totally disregards the evidence that scientists interpret, also has to be wrong. The whole Bible rules that out too, never mind Genesis 1. I’ll show us this in a minute.
But once we’ve ruled out the silly, irresponsible, careless ways that people have held to evolution or to 6-day creation, we then have to say that there are careful, thought-through ways to hold either of those positions as well. I have friends who want to submit to the Bible’s teaching, and engage with science carefully, but who have reached different conclusions. The only view I have absolutely no time for is when someone says that either 6-day creation or evolution is so obviously wrong that anyone who holds that view must be Neolithic, or a sceptic, or some other uncharitable label.
If you’re wondering what my view is, by the way, I can honestly say that this is one issue where I’m still struggling to make up my mind. It’s complex.
OK: Ground cleared. So what does Genesis 1 tell us about how the world came into being?
God
The hero of the story is clearly God. The Bible opens with no account of where God came from. He’s simply there. In the beginning, God.
And God sets about making a world and filing it with life apparently as easily as you or I would make a cup of tea. In fact more easily. All he has to do is speak, and things spring into being. I can think about a magnificent conifer up on the hill. But I can’t make one, let alone just by speaking its name. I can say the word “conifer”. But I cannot say a conifer.
God didn’t need any help to make the world. I’m no good at all at DIY, and always need someone to help with the simplest of tasks. Hold this. Is that in the middle of the wall? Could you press down here while I tighten this screw? Not God. Effortless power.
I love the throw-away lines. Verse 16 describes God making the sun and the moon. And God made the two great lights – the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. Then here comes the throw-away line: oh, and the stars.
We see God in complete control. At the start of the account, there is nothing. By the end, there is everything. All because God wanted the things that exist to exist. Only because God wanted the things that exist to exist.
Even more staggering, the New Testament makes clear that Jesus was the God who made everything at the beginning. John chapter 1 starts with a deliberate echo of Genesis 1: In the beginning was the word. … All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. Colossians 1 says that by Jesus all things were created … and in him all things hold together.
God is the hero of Genesis 1.
The World God Made
Genesis also tells us quite a bit about the world that God made. Let me point us to three details that this chapter draws our attention to.
First, God made an ordered world. There’s a deliberate structure to this account. On the first 3 days, God divides the world into different zones. Day and night. Sea and sky. Land and seas. Then on the next 3 days, God fills those zones with things that move. Sun and moon. Birds and fish. Animal life.
There are boundaries. There’s a coastline where the sea stops and the land begins. There’s a clear division between day and night. Everything in its place. Verse 2 is the world in chaos. By the end, God has put things in good order. He made an ordered world.
Second, God made a good world. The refrain at the end of each day is a detail that even a young child would notice in this account. Verse 4: The light was good. Verse 10: God saw that it was good. Verse 12: God saw that it was good. And so on, right down to day 6 in verse 25: And God saw that it was good.
God doesn’t just make everything there is. He steps back after each stage and surveys his handiwork, just like an artist or a craftsman. Most really good artists are never satisfied with their work. You or I may look at it and see an amazing portrait, but if you ask them they can always point out the flaws, the skin complexion just below the eye that they couldn’t quite get right. God is the only one whose assessment of something is always correct, and he surveys his own creation and sees that it is good.
So much seems wrong with the world today. Wars. Famines. People lose jobs. Fall ill. Loved ones die. We’ll think about why this is in a few weeks’ time, but the one thing we cannot say is that this is because the world was made broken. Nothing God made needs to be sold off cheap in the seconds section. Ever.
Third, God made the world in time. If God wanted, he could have instantly conjured up the finished item. Everything perfect, in the blink of an eye. He didn’t. Regardless of whether you regard the 6 days as 6 literal 24 hour periods, or as symbolic in some way, what is clear is that God made the world over a period of time. Stage by stage, step by step, he brought things to the point he wanted them.
Here’s the world that God made. An ordered world. A good world. Made in time.
Science and Ecology
Let’s come back to the questions of science and ecology. As I said at the start, plenty of people today would say that we don’t need the Bible to tell us about creation, because modern science and ecology tell us all we need to know.
But Genesis 1 reshapes our thinking about ecology completely. If anything, it makes taking good care of our planet even more important. We don’t own this planet. We’re not freeholders. It’s God’s planet, and we live here under license. The precious environment we live in is somebody else’s property. God made it, and so it’s his.
If someone lets you borrow their car, you’d take great care of it. I hope. You take no chances pulling out of a junction, you drive with full concentration, you don’t want to damage the precious car you’ve borrowed.
But we also look after the world in line with God’s wishes. If that friend lends you the car for a week, and asks you never to put standard grade petrol in, and to wash it with a sponge on the Tuesday, that’s what you need to do. You can’t think to yourself that your car never suffered from its lack of premium fuel, so surely it’s alright. It’s their car, so you look after it in the way they ask you to.
The Bible has a lot to say on how we look after the world. Far from modern ecology meaning we don’t need the Bible, we actually do need the Bible to learn how God wants his world cared for.
So much for ecology. How about science? Many people take the view that the world just is. Science can explain almost anything. Only the unexpected events are left as so-called “acts of God”, and as the centuries pass there are fewer of those.
Instead of that view, the very grounding for modern science is in this chapter. We see God working order out of chaos. We don’t live in a world where things happen haphazardly. Things happen consistently, because God is consistent, and he’s made an ordered world. If God hadn’t made things this way, repeating experiments to see how things work would be a waste of time. This is why so many of the great scientists of the past have been Christians. They’ve seen their task as trying to work out how God does things.
When I drop my pen, it accelerates to the ground at exactly the rate God wants it to. It just happens he always wants that to be 9.8 metres per second squared.
And this chapter also tells us why miracles happen. Miracle aren’t rare occasions when God is at work. He’s at work all the time. But if God is powerfully in control of his world, making every pen that is dropped fall to the floor, there’s nothing stopping him make a pen float to the ceiling if he wishes to. Why ever not?
If God wants to make a man walk on water, rather than fall through the surface into the water, he can do that, can’t he? He’s done that at least once with Jesus, and once with Peter. If God is masterfully in control of everything, he can do what he wants.
Modern ecology and modern science find their grounding in this chapter of the Bible.
Security
But that’s not why Genesis 1 is here. It’s got something far more wonderful to say than that.
The book of Genesis as a whole is really about God’s plan to save his people. If you were here when we looked at the story of Abraham a few months ago, we saw that then. We’ll see it again in the coming weeks.
The question Genesis 1 answers is who this saving God is. We’re going to read of God’s plan to save us from sin, from death, from suffering, from frustration, from so many things. And we want to know who this God is.
When you watch a superhero movie, part of the fun is that the hero is wearing a costume that means the people who are rescued have no idea who’s just taken them out of the burning building, or whatever it is. There’s a quest in the newspaper offices where Peter Parker works: Find out who Spiderman really is.
In Genesis we read of God, the greatest hero the world has ever seen, saving us from far worse than Superman ever did. But he doesn’t hide behind a mask. He wants us to know who he is. He wants us to know him. He is the maker of the world. The creator of everything.
Which means that nothing can stand in his way. So often life throws real hardships our way, and we struggle. Are God’s promises ever going to come true? Will God ever finally rescue us from everything painful?
If you’re looking to employ someone, you take up references. What has this person done before? Do they have what it takes to do the job? How about God? Does he have what it takes to look after us through life and then beyond?
And so we read of a God who made a world that, in the beginning, was perfectly good in every way. That God is so powerful that nobody can stand in his way. And yet he didn’t make that perfect world all in one instant. He made it in time, moving things step by step to where he wanted them.
Which means that when he promises to remake things so that they are perfect once again, he is plenty powerful enough to accomplish what he’s planned. When we find ourselves not yet at the end of the story, when life hurts, we remember that God doesn’t do things in an instant. And so we can trust that the world will be good again, very good.
Take up God’s references. What’s he done before? Can he look after us? Can he rescue us? We’re in no doubt once we have Genesis 1 in our Bibles.
Of course, to ignore God’s good plan to save us and deliver us would be the height of folly. We’re living in the world he’s made. To know that the God who made the world has a plan to bless the people in it who trust him, and then to turn our backs on that plan is a certain recipe for disaster.
God is our saviour. God is also our maker. And when life feels fragile, we need to be reminded that it’s the same God.
Conclusion
There’s a very simple song that the children sometimes sing. Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little one to him belong. They are weak, but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.
The trouble is that as we grow up, that can seem a little bit too simple. It doesn’t often feel that Jesus loves us.
Which is why God put Genesis 1 in our Bibles. Who is this Jesus we sing of? The one who was there in Genesis 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
That’s the Jesus that invites us to trust him with our life and even with our death. Nobody is better qualified.