Genesis 1

0:00 Well, before we get to it, let me just start by saying to you as a congregation, thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart and the bottom of the hearts of all my family for the opportunity you gave me over the last four months to be on sabbatical. That's the second sabbatical I've taken since I became the pastor here at Third Avenue, one about seven years ago, and then the last four months. And each time, it's been hugely refreshing to my soul. And I know that it's an unusual thing. I know that most pastors don't get to do that.

0:33 And I know certainly that most human beings don't get to do that. So the generosity that you have shown us in allowing me to take that time to rest and to refresh and to spend time with the family and do some pretty darn epic things, I am grateful to you for that. That's what we're not going to talk about though today. Maybe I'll show you some pictures of all of that and we'll talk about it in some more detail probably at the members meeting. So if that's a draw for you to come to the members meeting in the middle of September, let that be the case. You'll get to see polar bears and walruses and Justin taking off on a paraglider, which is more interesting than you might think.

1:12 Today, though, what we're going to do is open up God's word and hear from him. So let's get to it. We're beginning a new series this morning on the book of Genesis, a series that when all is said and done, By the time we get to the end of the book, I think it's going to be something like 50 or 60 sermons by the time we get to the end of Genesis. So it's one of those longer series that we do occasionally here. I've done that sort of series with Matthew and Romans, and I think that might be, and John. And so we're going to do it over the next few years with the book of Genesis.

1:43 We're not going to do it all at once. We're going to break it up into chunks and look at a chunk of it more or less about once a year. And then for the rest of the year, we're going to go to other places in the Bible so that we're looking at the whole counsel of God and not just spending, you know, the equivalent of like a year or more in one book. We like to move around, New Testament, Old Testament, all the different kinds of literary texts. So that's what we're going to be doing. If you've got a Bible, let me invite you to turn to Genesis chapter 1. That's where we're going to be today. You can start looking over it, letting your eyes kind of fall over the text and seeing the structure of it.

2:15 If you're using one of these pew Bibles like this one, the red pew Bibles that are either in front of you or under your seat, you'll be able to find Genesis chapter 1 on page 1. Yes, well done. Genesis chapter 1 is on page 1 of the Bible. You might have a little trouble finding it because there's no 1 on the page, but if you can find a 2, you can flip back one page and that will be Genesis 1. This fall, right up until Christmas, we'll stop this series about two weeks before Christmas, but right up until then, we're going to be looking at the first main section of this book, chapters 1 through 11, which tell the story of the primeval history of humanity.

2:57 From the moment of creation, when everything came into being, right up until God calls this pagan man named Abram to be the forefather of a great nation through whom, as the story goes on. He's ultimately going to save the entire world. As we make our way through chapters 1 through 11, you're going to recognize a whole lot of it. It's got stories in there that you've been hearing since you were a kid. That's probably true whether you're a Christian or not. You're going to hear about God's creation of the world. You're going to hear about Adam and Eve and the story of the serpent. You're going to hear about the fall of human beings. You're going to hear about Noah and the flood and the ark and the tower of Babel. All of it. But what I hope you'll see as we make our way through all those stories is that Genesis 1 through 11 is not interested in just giving you a collection of fun or cute or interesting or even useful stories. These chapters are doing something incredibly significant and that is laying down the foundation of the whole biblical storyline. Everything that's going to come for the rest of the Bible all the way through Revelation

4:00 has its beginning here. And you might think of it as Genesis 1 through 11 really setting the thematic pylons into the ground that everything else is going to be built on top of. The foundation is being laid here. Not just the foundation of the story of the Bible, but the foundation of the gospel, in fact. A whole lot of what we talk about when we talk about the gospel of Jesus Christ, his saving of sinners, doesn't make sense if you don't have Genesis 1 through 11. So if you want to understand the gospel, maybe for the first time, Or if you want to deepen your understanding of the gospel of Jesus, it starts right here in the book of Genesis.

4:35 We don't know much about the origins of Genesis. What we know is that the book is part of this five-book collection right at the beginning of the Bible that the Jews called the Torah or the law. That's how you translate that phrase, which we call the Pentateuch, the book of five, right? So it's Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. First five books of the Bible, they were all considered to be kind of one thing altogether. In terms of who wrote these books, there's a strong and unbroken tradition that holds that it was Moses who wrote the books, largely on the strength of the fact that there are several places in the Pentateuch, so in those five books, where it's literally said, Moses wrote this down, right?

5:13 And so if you have large swaths of the Pentateuch where it's literally said, Moses wrote this down, it's a safe assumption that Moses wrote the whole thing down. So that's where that case comes from. If that's true, if it was Moses who wrote it down, and there's no good reason to think otherwise, then that puts the composition of Genesis sometime, it's a little bit hard to date, but sometime around 1500 BC. So 1500 years before roughly the birth of Christ. So we're looking at a book that's 3,500 years old probably, though there was probably some editing and compiling that took place before the book kind of locked in in its final form, which was definitely done by the time of David. The book was in its final form by the time of David 3,000 years ago. But there's probably some editing of what Moses had done. The word Genesis that you see right up there at the top of the page, the word Genesis just means origins, or it means beginnings, if you want to think about it like that. And that's as good a title for this book as you're ever going to come up with, right? I mean, the Jews called the book In the Beginning, because they always did that with

6:15 their books. The very first few words of the Jewish books of the Bible became the name of the book. So this book was called In the Beginning, which is pretty good too. Genesis means origins, it means Beginnings, and it's a great name because this book is all about the beginnings of things. It's about the beginnings of the cosmos, the beginnings of humanity. Ultimately, it becomes the story of the beginning of the nation of Israel, from whom later on came Jesus, the Christ. And its main point, in every story, in every twist and turn of the narrative, every new character that comes up and interacts with the world around him and with God, the point in every story is to convince you, first the Israelites, but now you as a reader, that our God whom we worship is utterly unrivaled and unstoppably sovereign. There is no one before him. There is no one beside him. He is the one alone who is directing the currents of history to his appointed ends,

7:19 and nobody's going to stop that. That's what the Bible wants you to understand. It's what Genesis wants you to understand. That's the point. And this book starts making that point right from the very beginning. Today we're going to be looking at chapter one and the first few verses of chapter two. So if you just look down, you'll see chapter one has 31 verses. And then you've got the first three verses of chapter two. You all know, because you've been studying the Bible long enough, that chapter divisions in the Bible are usually pretty good, but they're not inspired. They came about in the Middle Ages sometimes. It was just a monk that decided to divide the Bible up into chapters and verses. They're not inspired. We don't have to go by them when we think the monk messed up. And in this case, the monk messed up pretty badly. Not a great start for him. The first three verses of chapter 2 belong with chapter 1. And so when we study it today, we're going to just include them.

8:11 And then when we come to chapter 2, we'll pick that up in verse 4. So we're going to be looking at those verses, the account of God's creation of the world, including human beings. And what you're going to notice as soon as I start reading it, right? I mean, you may not have looked at a Bible in, you know, years or decades. This may be utterly new to you, this whole church thing, but you're going to recognize the words because this is one of the most famous passages in the entire Bible. And even as it's set in the stage for everything that's going to come, what it's trying to do is get you to look in awe at this God of the universe who created everything and feel small before him. So let's read it. Genesis chapter 1, beginning in verse 1.

8:56 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, 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. So 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. 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 dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together. He called seas. 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

9:58 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 and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth and it was so God made the two 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.

10:39 And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning the fourth 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. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas and let birds multiply on the earth and there was evening and there was morning the fifth day.

11:12 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. 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 and 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.

11:43 In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them. 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've 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.

12:17 And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. Because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

12:49 If you've been a Christian for very long, or even if you've lived in a place like the United States of America where Christianity is popular, You have probably heard or read that passage a thousand times. And if you're a good evangelical Christian, half of those thousand times have probably been as you have started yet again your yearly Bible reading. Most of those plans tend to die somewhere in Leviticus, don't they? But they start in Genesis 1.

13:20 And we can make our way through that pretty easily. So it may be that you've read this passage more than you have read any passage of the Bible ever in your entire life. So it's familiar, probably, to you. But here's my plea as we look at these verses over the next little bit. Don't let your familiarity with these words numb you to what they're trying to do. Don't let the fact that they're familiar to you numb you or blind you or make you bored and insensate to what these words are trying to do to their effect.

13:52 This passage is meant to evoke in you, in your heart, a sense of awe, of mystery. Of first this kind of cosmic silence and then this explosion of activity as God first creates the world and then fills it with creatures of every kind. Including at the end, at most length, and in most detail, humans. Us. It's just an extraordinary chapter of the Bible. And above all, it's got something to press on our minds, on our hearts, and our consciences. Here's the main idea. God is your creator and therefore your king.

14:27 Worship him and be what he intended you to be. God is your creator and therefore your king. So worship him and be what he intended you to be. Now, I realize that last part, be all that you can be. I realize that that part right there might sound a little bit moralistic. It sounds a bit like, all right, fine, I will be what God intends me to be. I will grab my own bootstraps and I will read the Bible a little more and pray once more than I usually do every day. And I will try harder to be a good person or a solid Christian or whatever it is that God intends me to be.

14:59 I'll do that. But don't misunderstand me and hang with me because I think you'll see that that's not what I mean by that at all. I am not calling you to some extra effort to be everything that God intended you to be. That's not the point at all. In fact, I think in a really sort of surprising way, what we're going to see today is that even this very first chapter of the Bible ultimately points our eyes to Jesus. And in fact, it paints a little picture of Jesus that you may or may not have seen as you've read it before.

15:30 But we've got some work to do before we get there. I want to look at this passage today in two points. Number one, God, the all-powerful creator. And then point number two, man, it's you and me, humanity, man, the crown of creation. So two characters that sort of take center stage in this narrative. God, the all-powerful creator, that's first and most important. And then man, the crown or the pinnacle of creation. And as we look at this, my prayer for you is that your heart's going to be filled up with a new kind of awe for who this God that you've just spent the last hour singing to really is and who you are and who you're meant to be before him.

16:10 All right, so let's go. God, the all-powerful creator, that's point number one. The focus of this entire chapter is God. He's the main character. He's the focus. He's the center again and again and again. It's God did this, God did this, God did this. The whole goal of the chapter is put your eyes on him and leave you just kind of slap-jawed at his majesty and his power and his amazing creativity in bringing the cosmos into being. The chapter itself, I mean, you can tell just kind of by the way you read it.

16:42 It's got this kind of cadence to it, right? And there was evening and there was morning the first day. There was evening and morning the second. It's got this cadence to it, repeated phrases. It's highly stylized, which just means that even though it's recounting true and actual events that actually happened, it's doing so in a way that uses structure and poetry and repetition to enhance the beauty of what you're reading. So, for example, you can see, if you just look at it, that the whole thing is kind of structured around these seven days, right?

17:13 But then there are other things that happen in the telling of the story that reinforce that idea of seven to you, which in the ancient mind had to do with completeness, right? It had to do with something being complete, seven, seven, seven. And so again and again, your mind is brought back to seven, sometimes even sort of subconsciously. As you read it, your mind is being, at least in the Hebrew, your mind is being reminded of these sevens. So for example, verse one. In the Hebrew, you can't just look down at your English Bible and see this, but in the Hebrew, it's made up of seven words.

17:48 Verse 2 is made up of 14 words, seven times two. If you look at chapter 2, verses 1 to 3, that little paragraph is made up of 35 words, seven times five. That's interesting, isn't it? Seven times one, seven times two, and then at the end, seven times five. We're not exactly sure where 7 times 3 and 7 times 4 are. There's debate about how those might be counted, and it has to do with how Hebrew constructs and contractions work and all the rest.

18:19 But they're probably there, and somebody's probably identified them through history. But you can see the way those 7s are first there, beating like a drum throughout the passage, but also increasing and crescendoing until you get to the 35 at the very end of it. In verses 1 to 3 of chapter 2, like within that 35, you've got five phrases. The whole thing is made up of five phrases. I'm not going to break it down exactly what they are, but just trust me. Five phrases that make up those three verses. The middle three of those, so phrase 2, phrase 3, and phrase 4, are each made up of seven words.

18:56 And the middle word of each of those seven is the word seventh. Now, none of that's accidental. Right? It's Moses, the author, styling this narrative for you to reinforce its beauty in your mind. By the end of this thing, you're supposed to have a sense of awe about the majesty and the completeness of this God who created everything. Look down at it. You can see, if you look at, say, verse 5, and then verse 8, and then verse 13, etc., etc., you can see that the major structure of the narrative is that the story is told in terms of seven days.

19:40 And even the way those seven days are structured is very deliberate. So let's look at them. Look at day one. It's verses three through five. God said, let there be light. There was light. God saw that the light was good. God separated the light from the darkness. Called the light day and the darkness he called night. There was evening and there was morning the first day. So what gets created in the first day? What happens? Light, right? So the expanse of the cosmos is sort of filled up we have space all of a sudden and it's it's filled with with some kind of light it doesn't say anything about the source here but but there's there's light it's like this this giant space that's filled up with light what happens on day two god said let there be an this is verse six god said let there be an expanse so a space that's what that word means it doesn't mean firmament so if you've seen that on youtube or something like that or it's said to be a solid dome of some kind. That is not what the word means. The word expanse means space. God said, let there be space in the midst of the waters and let that space separate water from water. So God made the space and he separated the waters that were under the space from the waters that were over the space.

20:44 You see what that's doing, right? It's creating like this massive ocean with no land, then some space up above it, and then some waters above that, which are probably very, very heavy clouds at that point, right? They're almost solid with water, but there they are, they're clouds. Water above, water below the expanse. But do you see what's happening? God is creating another space. He's creating another realm to put things in, right? You have the realm of space, light, and then you've got this realm of the sky, so to speak, the heavens, where God is going to put things later.

21:17 Look at the third day, 11 or 9. God said, verse 9, God said, let the waters that are under the heavens or under the sky be gathered together in 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 and God saw that it was good. What's being created there? Another space. Actually, two. You're getting the space of the oceans, but you're also getting the space of the dry land. So you see what's happening, right? First, you've got the creation of, you know, the heavens, right, where the stars are going to go.

21:51 Then you've got the creation of the sky. Then you've got, on the third day, the creation of dry land and ocean. What God is doing, it's almost like he's building houses that he's going to fill up in the second three days of creation. He's creating these realms that are going to be filled up with things, which is exactly what happens, right? On day four, what does he make? Sun, moon, and stars. They go into that light space, the cosmos, right? What does he make on day five? Birds and fish. Birds in the ocean and fish in the sky, right?

22:25 No, that's not. It's the other way. But that'd be a disaster. Fish in the ocean, birds in the sky. He fills up those spaces. And then on the sixth day, what does he make? He fills up the dry land, land, animals, and man. So you can see how it works. You can see how it's styled. There's an order to it, even in the telling. In the first three days, God creates these various realms of the heavens, the sky, the sea, the dry land. And then in days four to six, he fills up those realms. And then at the very end, in day seven, God himself rests over all of it.

23:02 He doesn't rest because he's tired. He rests because he's done. The work of creation is finished. And in his resting, you can see what the story is driving you to realize. By the end of this, when God sits and rests on the seventh day, the creator, God, is sitting enthroned over everything that he has made. There's no one to rival him. There's no one who has helped him do this. There's no one ahead of him or beside him. He is the king of the universe, and there is no one like him.

23:34 He sits enthroned over his cosmos. In fact, that message really comes through even in the very first sentence of the book. Look at 1-1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That sentence has gone down in history as one of the most famous sentences in history because it is incredible. I mean, if you're going to write a history of the world, what better way to start it than just like that? There's no adornment. There's no decoration.

24:04 It's just, in the beginning, God created everything. And think about what it's saying. Just think about the various parts of this sentence. In the beginning. That's talking about the beginning of time. It's talking about the launching of time. Because the existence of a beginning implies the existence of movement and then the existence of an end. God launches time in the beginning. In the beginning, God.

24:36 God alone. Nothing else. No one with him. Nothing independent of him. Everything that is right now, everything that ever has been and everything that ever will be has its origin, its beginning in him. In the beginning, God and God alone. Keep going. In the beginning, God created. He created. That word is fascinating. The word created is used 49 times exactly in the Bible. 49 times exactly in the Bible. What's incredible about that word is that every single time it's used, all 49 times, the subject of that word created is God.

25:16 It's never anybody else. So people throughout the Bible are said to do a whole lot of things. They can work, they can make, they can build, they can form, but only God creates. Only God speaks to nothingness and makes something appear out of it. That's what Christians through the centuries have called creation ex nihilo. Ex nihilo, so ex is Latin for out of, right? Ex, out of, exit, out of. Nihilo, N-I-H-I-L-O.

25:50 Nihil, like nihilism, right? It means nothingness. So creation ex nihilo means creation out of nothing. God speaks to nothingness and something exists all of a sudden. Friend, you can build, you can make, you can form, but you cannot create. You just can't. I mean, try it sometime. Like in the privacy of your own house when you won't be embarrassed. Like stand there and look at that empty space right there and say, let there be a bunny.

26:22 Friend, it ain't going to happen. it ain't gonna happen you can't create ex nihilo only God can do that creation ex nihilo is God's power unique in the universe to make something out of nothing which if you think about it is already the Bible preaching to you what will ultimately become the gospel of Jesus Christ because what God does when he saves a sinner from their sins is that he creates something out of nothing. Paul says it in chapter 4 of Romans. God is the one and the only one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that are not. Friend, if you're a Christian, that's you. That's your story. You were called by the God of the universe into existence when you were not. When you were nothing. In the beginning, in your own heart, God created. Praise him for it.

27:29 Well, let's keep looking at the details more. At this point, we need to look very carefully at the order of what happens here, especially in the first couple of verses, because it can be confusing if you're not careful. Most of the time, I think we as Christians tend to come to passages like this, and we see that they're a little bit poetic. And so our natural response to that is to sort of cross our eyes so that the words get a little bit blurry, and we read it like this, and the details don't really matter to us. Because we have this movie that's playing in our head about what happened, and we just sort of pretend like, if I shove really hard and blur the words out and cross my eyes, I can make it all fit.

28:02 That is not how you should read the Bible. The Bible says what it means, and it means what it says, and you should look at the words. And so that's what we need to do here. So if you look down at verse 1, You've got this statement there that God created the heavens and the earth. And then in verse 2, I want you to look at verse 2, and I want you to notice that already in verse 2, something is already there. Already in verse 2, something is there. What's there already? You look at it and think about it. What is there already when you get to verse 2?

28:37 The earth and water. The earth and water are already there by the time you get to verse 2. And if you look down to verse 6 and look at the details, you can see that it doesn't say there that God created the waters. It's just that he separated waters that were already there. Okay, so what does that mean? Does that mean that everything I just said about God creating ex nihilo was wrong and that he actually started out with something called earth and something called water and he just formed those things into what we see now?

29:08 Is that what it means? No. What it means, if you read the story carefully, is that the first act of creation happens in verse 1. Most of the time we think of it happening in verse 3. Like, there's nothing there except light, after he says it's not true. There was earth and water, and in verse 3, you get some light on it. But the first act of creation happens in verse 1, and then verse 2 tells us what was the result. Like, what was the circumstance? After God did the first act of creation, what was the circumstance that was the result of that act of creation?

29:42 So it describes what exists before God acts further to form and shape this world thing that he's created, ex nihilo. Okay, look at verse 2 again. The text there says that the earth was without form and void. Or another way to translate that word would be empty. It's without form, and it's empty. In Hebrew, those words are tohu wabohu, which I tell you for no other reason than that they are ridiculous fun to say.

30:16 Tohu wabohu, unorganized and empty. That's what they mean, tohu wabohu, unorganized and empty. You can use that on your children. Your head, you little punk, is tohu wabohu. Anyway, this formless and empty, unorganized and void earth, if you look at verse 2, seems to be covered in water and darkness. It's just an utterly chaotic and kind of terrifying place. And yet, if you look at it again, it's not something that stands beside God, as if He and the chaos are both eternally present, and God just manages to bend the chaos to His will.

30:54 No, you look at the verse, the Spirit of God is hovering over it all. Now some people have said that because the Hebrew word for spirit and wind is the same, that what you actually have there is a great wind of God, right? A mighty wind blowing over this formless earth like some kind of horrible cosmic storm. But that's not really what it says. It uses the word hovering, not blowing. And that's a very personal word. It's like an eagle hovering over her chicks, right? That's how that word is used. So it's personal. It's the Spirit of God hovering over this chaos, ruling over it, in fact.

31:32 And then after that, starting in verse 3, you get the six days of creation in pretty rapid succession. So God creates light, then he divides the upper and lower waters with this space called heaven. In some of your Bibles, better is sky, that's a better way to translate that word. Then he divides the, once the upper and lower waters are separated, he takes the lower waters and divides them also. So that dry land appears and sprouts plants. Then in day four, verse 14, you get the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars and, right, break sound.

32:05 How did we have light in day one without the sun, moon, and stars in day four? How's light created in day one, but the sun is only created in day four? It's a great question. Some have said that there's no way that that's the case. They say the sun must have been there. And when the text says that God made the sun or said let there be lights in the expanse, he was just parting the clouds enough so that the sun becomes visible for the very first time. Some people have said that. I don't think that's it. There's nothing to make us think that. Probably the best way to understand it is that the light in day one was just light with no particular source.

32:42 Or maybe it was light from the glory of God becoming visible for the first time. Who knows? We don't know exactly, but it's hardly a killer argument or an unexplainable problem. Anyway, after that, God takes all of these realms that he's made and he fills the skies and the oceans with birds and fish. And then in day six, he fills the land with animals and then you get this long and profound account of the creation of human beings. And then, of course, the seventh day, Sabbath, rest. That's what happens. In all of that, though, in all of that that happens, all of the building of the realms, right, That makes it not unorganized.

33:16 Remember that phrase, formless and void? The whole story is about him making it not formless and then not empty, right? So he forms it into these realms, and then he fills it with all of the creatures. It's no longer formless and void by the end of it. What I want you to see in the midst of all of that is that this text is not just interested in telling you the history of the creation of the world, though it does that. Also, its point is not to invite you to dwell a whole lot on the details. How long was a day? What does yod mean?

33:47 What does kinds mean? How is there light without a sun? Some of those things are important in their own way. It's not his point. What this text wants you to dwell on, what it wants you to stare at and stand in awe of is God. And as you do that, it wants your heart to settle into trust of him. I mean, think about what was going on when this book was most likely written. I mean, you realize that it wasn't, like, Moses wasn't there watching this and writing it down, right?

34:23 It was written, like, thousands of years, at least, after God did all of this stuff. What was going on? Think about it. What was going on when Moses most likely wrote this book? If this book was written right around the same time as Deuteronomy, which seems likely, then it was written while this brand new messed up nation of Israel was sitting on the edge of the Jordan River shivering and scared out of their minds about to go into the promised land to face some really powerful nations that they were supposed to kill or get killed by you know what they were going to face as soon as they crossed the Jordan River they were going to face nation after nation after nation that was going to claim that their gods were more powerful than Yahweh, that their gods were going to smash Yahweh and Yahweh's people, and that at best, the God of Israel was just one God among many.

35:16 That's the worldview that would have surrounded the Israelites, and they would have been sorely tempted to believe it, to conform their minds and hearts to those lies, and they would have been afraid well friends it's not much different for us as christians because the world around us wants to tell us the very same thing that the pagan nations then wanted to tell us your god is weak your god can't stand against us you're on the wrong side of history yahweh is going to get crushed by the revolution and you spend enough time out there you are going to be sorely tempted to believe it and your heart is going to quake.

36:01 But then you read words like this, in the beginning, God created everything and sat enthroned alone above it all. Friends, those words will pour like concrete into your soul. They'll settle you. They'll establish you so that you can face the gods of this world down and say, no, no, no, no. You'll never crush Yahweh because in the beginning, He created it all. That's the God they served.

36:33 That's the God they followed. That's the God that was fighting for them. And that's the God that you serve and follow. And it's fighting for you. You know, you could spend a lifetime, I think, listing out all the things that this chapter teaches us about who God is. Right? It would be a good thing for you to maybe spend an afternoon looking at. What does this chapter teach us about God? You could get a lot, but I want to give you four before we move on. I want you to see four things that this chapter teaches us about God before we move on.

37:05 First, God is utterly and completely sovereign over everything. He is utterly and completely sovereign over everything. He creates everything and he rules over everything. In verse 2, he rules over the chaos that is the first state of his creation. And in 2, 1 through 3, he rules over this now organized and filled and beautiful universe. And friends, understanding that God is so utterly and completely sovereign is critical to your faith as a Christian.

37:39 See, the pagans that surrounded Israel identified the various parts of creation as their gods. So they would have a river god and a sea god and a mountain god. And in their minds, those gods were always in conflict with one another. And humans were just sort of at their mercy. So if the lightning god wanted to do his thing against the mountain god, well, then the humans who happened to be on the mountain were going to be in trouble as those two gods clashed, right? Humans were just at their mercy to be crushed in conflict. Or maybe if you're lucky, or if you could convince those gods to like you for a few minutes, you can eke out a living from them for a few years.

38:17 That's what the pagans believed all around the nation of Israel. But here, Genesis is saying those aren't gods. They're created beings. It's Yahweh who has made them, and it's Yahweh who rules over them. Look with me down at verse 21. I'll give you one example of this that I think is fascinating. Verse 21. So God, this is the fifth day, and God's filling up the seas and the skies.

38:50 right? So God created the great sea creatures, and every living creature that moves, sea creatures. Know what that word is? That word in Hebrew is the tanin, which when translated means dragon. It means dragon. Now, why do I kind of pause on that? It's not because I'm trying to tell you that there are dragons out there that you can go slay. That's not the point. Who gets called the dragon in the Bible, Satan.

39:25 So you see, even before Satan comes on the scene, God is telling you, the reader, I am sovereign even over the dragon. I am sovereign even over the serpent he's created. Yahweh rules over them all. God is sovereign and that is very good for us. Second, God is good. This text tells us very clearly that God is good. Even right here in the very first chapter of the Bible, God is doing good for human beings.

39:58 So you've noticed probably, as we've talked about it, how several times throughout this, God says his work was good. Verse 4, verse 10, sort of almost at the end of every day, he says, and it was good, right? And then at the very end of it, in verse 31, when the humans are on the scene, he says it's very good. Why does God say that each time? Is he just congratulating himself for a job well done? Right? Like, let there be bunnies. Oh, that's good. Right? Is that what's going on? Under what circumstances does God say things are good?

40:29 Because what's interesting is that he does not, in fact, say it every time. Look at day two. Verse six through nine. I mean, or six through eight. You can look all the way down through there. This is when the waters get separated, right? All you have is ocean and water above the sky, right? Gets separated. He doesn't say that's good. Why not? well here's the here's the pattern god says it is good every time and only when creation takes another step toward being inhabitable by humans every time creation gets a little bit closer to being inhabitable by humans god says it's good so light is good you got to have that dry land is good. Plants and animals are good. They too, though, a giant ocean with clouds above it is not good for human beings. It is a sort of intermediate step to get there, right? But it's not good, and so God doesn't say it's good. You see the point? God's heart in this whole thing, this whole act of creation,

41:31 his aim and goal is to make the earth a place that is good for us. From the very beginning, the God of the universe has loved us. In fact, he did all of this to create a good place for us. Third thing, just, I mean, it's easy. God speaks. God speaks. Do you notice how the whole chapter is driven by the words, and God said? It's God's words that are the mechanism by which he makes things happen. God said, let there be light, and bam, there's light. God said, let there be animals, and bam, there's animals. God said, let there be a sun and a moon. Bam, bam, there's sun and moon, and trillions of stars.

42:10 This is a God who calls with his words into being things that do not exist. He's a God who makes life where there is no life, and he does it always, always through his word. Now, I wonder if anybody's coming here today, and you kind of read verse two, and you think, wow, that's sort of my soul. Dark and formless and empty and void, and every time I look inside my soul, I just feel this chaos, this kind of terrifying, dark, silent chaos.

42:45 Friend, if that's you, if you ever experienced that, do you know what you need to bring all that to life? Do you know what you need to cause your soul to sprout up into life? You need the Word of God spoken into it. You need the Bible spoken into it. You need the word of the gospel of Jesus Christ spoken into it. You need God to call your soul to life. God speaks forth. God redeems.

43:17 I mean, at this point in the story, there's no real need for redemption, right? There's no sin, so you don't need redemption. But even though there's no redemption, you can already see, even here, before there's any sin, You can see that God is about the work of bringing good out of the terrifying situation that exists in verse 2. He's about the work of bringing order out of chaos, beauty out of ugliness. That's what he does. And that's going to be the whole story of the whole rest of the Bible. There's this impulse in God's heart to make things good and right when they are profoundly wrong.

43:55 And that's our whole hope as Christians. If that were not God's heart, if that were not his impulse, we would be hopeless. If God were like you and me, whose impulse a lot of the time is to look at an ugly situation and walk away from it, if that were God's impulse, we'd be hopeless. It's not God's impulse at all. His impulse is to look at the wreck of your life and say, I'm going to fix that. And he does. Through the whole rest of the Bible, God redeems. I mean, think about the picture that we're painting here.

44:26 a sovereign, good, speaking, redeeming God. That's who Genesis 1 is holding out to you and inviting you to know. But it's also inviting you to know yourself. So we move on to point two. Man, the crown of creation. Man, the crown of creation. So the days of creation come to their climax in day six. And the text makes obvious in a few ways that this is, in fact, the climax.

44:58 Day six begins in verse 26 there. You can look at it. Several things that sort of make this one stand out. For one, there's just the length of the account of the sixth day. It's significantly longer than any other. You get far more detail about it. God says more in the sixth day. More details are given about exactly what God does to bring things about in the sixth day. And then at the end of it, there's this escalation of that phrase, it was good, into it was very good. And so you see that this sixth day is what the whole thing has been aiming for.

45:29 Create the realms, fill them up, get the earth habitable for humans. And then on the end of day six, bam, there are the humans. And all of a sudden, things are not just good, but very good now that the humans are here. The account of the creation of mankind, which is, it's actually told two times in the Bible. We're going to look at it in chapter two, a different account, you know, different details and such. They harmonize perfectly. But in this one, the account of the creation of mankind is one of the most important sections of the entire Bible.

46:00 Because what's happening is that it's really setting the agenda for everything that's about to happen. The whole storyline of the Bible has its agenda set. It has its climax set. It has its conflict set. Everything is being set right here at the creation of mankind. In fact, there are certain seeds, little words that are present in this telling of the creation of humans. They're seeds, and as the Bible goes on and tells its story, they eventually grow into these enormous, you know, sequoias of meaning that are just full of meaning and significance, but they just started out as words here.

46:35 Themes are launched and developed all the way through to their conclusion in Revelation right here. So it's worth taking some time to look at it carefully. Look at verses 26 through 31. That's where we're going to be. I've already read it, so I won't take the time to read it again. There's a lot to notice here, and the fact is, as we make our way through Genesis 2 and Genesis 3, we're going to return to these verses again and again. You're going to see us come back to them because they're so important here at the beginning of the story. But a few things particularly that I want you to notice here about this.

47:07 First of all, I want you to notice that human beings are specially created by God. Human beings are specially created by God as something new and special. So we'll get more detail about that in chapter 2, exactly how it happened. But it's worth noting that humans here on day 6 are set apart from God's creation of the animals. God creates animals, and then he starts a new thing and creates humans. So friends, the takeaway from this, this may seem obvious to you, is that we are not just one more animal.

47:46 No matter what your biology teacher told you in 7th grade, You are not just one more animal. We are something else. We are something more. You are not just your dog that figured out eventually how to use tools and talk. You're something different. You're something new. The world wants you to think. It wants you to think right down to the very bottom of your heart that you are just a hairless ape that eventually figured out how to make a fire. Friends, the Bible stands four square against that idea.

48:19 Humans did not simply evolve up from other animals. We are a different thing entirely. We inhabit a wholly different category in God's mind. Which means, if you've never thought about that, if that's a new thought to you, friend, you are not an accident. You're not just an accidental coming together of some atoms that managed somehow to make DNA in a cell membrane all in exactly the same nanosecond and then managed to divide and divide again and blah, blah, blah, blah. And here you are. That's not you. You're not an accident.

48:51 Humanity is not an accident. You were created by God for a purpose. He meant to create you. And he has something for you to do. Second thing that I want you to notice here. Human beings were created by God as male and female. Human beings were created by God as male and female. You can see that in verse 27. Maleness and femaleness are not something incidental to humans. They're not just something that's on the outside.

49:22 They're not just a choice that we make. They lie right at the core of who we are as humans. So that means, friends, that if you are a human, you are either male or female. And to deny that or seek to change it or just to decide on a particular day that you don't want to be what God has made you puts you in fundamental conflict with who you are and the God who made you. Now, we don't want to be naive about all of that, right? Obviously, there's a small number of human beings who have certain chromosomal abnormalities that put them outside that vast norm.

50:02 If you know any of those people, or if that even describes you, then you know that that can be a very difficult situation. But the reason it's a difficult situation is also the point. Those chromosomal abnormalities are abnormalities. They're not the usual pattern. The usual pattern, when everything happens as it's supposed to happen, and we know it doesn't in life. Things often don't happen like they're supposed to happen. But when things happen as they're supposed to happen, the pattern that holds for the vast majority of humans is that God created us male and female.

50:40 And that is good. Third, and the thing I want to put your focus on today, look at verse 26. Human beings are created in or as the image and likeness of God. Okay, why do I say that? Because most of your Bibles are going to say, in the image of God, according to the likeness of God. They're going to say in or according to. But a better translation, and I would encourage you to take your little pen, scratch it out, write it in there.

51:14 Better translation for both of those prepositions is that we are created as the image of God, as the likeness of God. Now, if you think about it, you can see the difference, right? We don't, as human beings, just somehow reflect something else that is the image of God, which is what created in the image would mean. That connotes that we just are reflecting something else that is the image. We're created according to the likeness. That's not what it says.

51:45 It says we are the image. We are the likeness of God. If you want to see that somewhere else in the Bible, you can look at 1 Corinthians 11, 7 to see Paul using exactly that kind of language. We are the image and likeness of God. Okay, but what does that mean? What does it mean? We're going to have more time to think about this in chapter 2 and 3 in particular. But let's just kick it around for a minute. Various ideas. Some people have said, well, it means that there are certain characteristics of God that we also share that make us different from the animals, right? So maybe it's reason or relationship or creativity.

52:20 But I think if you look at the text, none of those things quite gets it. And the Bible just never really connects the idea of image or likeness to things like reason, relationship, creativity. It just doesn't. So how do you get at what that word, what those words really mean? Well, one way to do it, or at least to get a good start on it, is just to see what the Bible itself says is the significance of the humans being created as God's image. So you've got the statement in 26, let's create man as our image, as our likeness. And then in 27, you sort of have the significance of that.

52:53 You see what comes after the statement that they're going to be created as his image? It's verse 27, it's that they should have dominion. Image is connected to dominion. In other words, because we are created as the image of God, therefore we are to have dominion over the earth. A lot more about that later and how we messed it up as human beings. But it becomes a critical issue at the moment of man's fall. For now, though, what I want you to see is that our being given dominion over the world, humanity's being given dominion over the world, helps define what it means to be created as God's image.

53:30 That's the realm. When you think about the image of God, the realm of ideas that you ought to be thinking in is the realm of rule. It's not reason and creativity and relationship. Those have some play in it, but I am in the image of God. I am as the image of God. I am the image of God speaks to rule. Well, there's a little more too because it turns out, and here I'm just going to have to teach you a little bit. It turns out that the ideas of image and likeness were pretty well known in the ancient world.

54:03 Moses didn't make these words up. He didn't make these concepts up. They were well known. And when the Israelites read those words, oh, image, likeness, I get that. I understand that because I've seen it before. They were well known in the ancient world and they were often applied to kings, especially to define the relationship of the king to whatever God he worshiped. The king was said to be the likeness of his God. He was said to be the image of his God. So hang with me here. This is important. You might want to write those two words down because I'm going to tell you what they refer to.

54:37 Likeness and image. When a king was said in the ancient world to be the likeness of his God, that had to do with his unique special relationship to the God. The king was special. He was different from all the other people. He had a special relationship to his God that the people did not have. In fact, so special and unique was that relationship that to be called the likeness of the God meant that he was said to be the son of that God.

55:15 To be in the likeness of someone is to be a son of that someone. It had to do with the relationship of the king to the God and that specialness, son-like relationship that existed. presumably between them. Image was different. Image was a different thing. When a king was said to be the image of his God, that didn't mean, it wasn't talking about his relationship to the God, that's likeness. What it's talking about is that he is the representative of his God to the people. It had to do with his right to rule. As the image of that God, he spoke and ruled for his God as his representative, right? So you see the slight difference there? Likeness has to do with the king looking into the face of his God and having a special relationship with the God. I am your likeness. I am your son, right? Image, he becomes the image when he turns and looks out at his people and says, because I'm the image of God, I have the right to rule you.

56:14 You might say that the image meant that the king was the servant of the God, and therefore the king of the people okay lots of concepts but but let them start to settle in your mind let let all those words kind of settle in your mind like roll them over a little bit when human beings are set in genesis 1 to be the likeness of god that means that we are created to be in a special relationship with God. We are created to be His sons, His children. And when we're said to be the image of God, it means we're to be His representatives in the world. Servants of God and kings in the cosmos that okay that's starting to fire yet sons servants kings to be made in the image and

57:17 likeness of God means that God's ultimate purpose for us as a human race the reason he created us in the first place was so that we would be his sons and servant kings in creation you see where that's going you see where that's going where that's going is that we were called to be those things and yet we messed it up completely. And so Jesus came and Jesus is said to be those things exactly. The son of God and the servant king above all others.

57:53 We're going to see that play out over the next few weeks but the fact is we made an absolute mess of our job in that regard. Instead of being in this special relationship to God as his sons we rebelled against him. We turned away from him. Instead of ruling the world under him as servant kings, as he meant us to, we rebelled against him, joined the serpent, and declared war on him. And so Jesus came and did what we failed to do. The eternal Son of God became man and picked up the crown of the servant king that we dropped in the gutter.

58:25 And he was crowned with it forevermore. And you know what's even more spectacular than that Jesus is now the son and servant king that we failed to be? You know what's even more spectacular is that the Bible says that when we put our faith in him, when we become Christians and he becomes our king, he actually restores us to our rightful place as sons and servant kings in the cosmos. You ever seen that in the New Testament? Galatians 3.26, in Christ Jesus, you all are sons of God through faith.

58:59 2 Timothy 2.12, Revelation 20, believers will reign with him. Do you see how those themes grow into sequoias through the whole rest of the Bible? Do you see that you were created for something more than you ever imagined? You're not created just every five years to get the new brand new SUV or car. You're not created to just work all your life so you can buy a house on the beach or a wakeboat, which is super fun.

59:34 that's not what you're created for you are created to be a son and a king that's only going to happen it's only going to happen through the one who is the son and the servant king above all it's only going to happen when you come to Jesus put your faith in him and enter into his kingdom don't let another day don't let another day go by living in a way that is unworthy of what God made you to be let's pray Lord we thank you for your kindness and goodness we thank you for your majesty and your creative power we praise you as the one who made the cosmos and who now sits enthroned above it Lord above all we thank you that even though we defaulted, even though we failed in our job to be sons and kings in the cosmos yet you sent your son Jesus to do what we failed to do and then invite us into your kingdom and into your family once again.

1:00:36 Our Lord, you are a good God and we praise you for that today. We do all of this in the name of Jesus. Amen.