So, for the summer months, we’re going to spend uh time together right at the very beginning of scripture, beginning of the Bible, the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. In these chapters, there are four really deeply significant events take place. They explain so much of our lives, uh who we are and why we’re here, and why we’re we’re in trouble. We have this mixed bag in us of good and cruelty and and why our world is the way it is. And those four events, the creation of the world, uh the fall of mankind into sin, the great flood, and the dispersal of nations at the Tower of Babel. All of those are essential in explaining how we got here, to where we are today, the background of our world. There are a few preliminary matters we’re going to consider this morning and uh in the uh before we jump into the meat of the book of Genesis. And that’s why we’re really only looking at the first two verses uh this morning, verses that read this, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now, the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Now, one of the preliminary concerns, uh to at least mention, we don’t want to get distracted by it, at least mention is the relationship between Genesis, particularly the first two chapters, and discoveries that have been made in science through physics and chemistry and biology and geology and mathematics. Are the book of Genesis and the world of science, are they incompatible? Is there a way for them to play nicely? Are they destined to be rivals for all time? You know, at Knox Church, we have a very high view of the Bible, and we would assert that everything Genesis says about our origins are true and accurate. But that doesn’t mean that’s not saying the same thing as uh saying that we should approach Genesis as we would uh science textbook. Rebecca McLaughlin, in her book Confronting Christianity is helpful when she says that the creation account in Genesis is primarily concerned with meaning making, not fact finding. She says Genesis is not primarily concerned with science. If it were, we would expect the accounts to be teeming with formulas and phenotypes, but the lack of scientific detail is not an oversight. Rather, it’s a deliberate prioritization of a more important message. So, she goes on to write, “As a Christian, I believe that every detail of the creation accounts in Genesis is inspired by God, and that these opening chapters are the first course in the Bible’s feast of foundational answers to our deepest questions. Who are we? What does life mean? How do we relate to God and to one another?” She says, “God could have begun the Bible with a detailed scientific description of the universe, just as I could tuck my kids in bed at night and tell them that they are mammals uh whose genetic identity arises from a combination of my DNA and that of their other progenitor. Those statements are true, and they communicate useful information that I’d like my children to learn in the coming years. But right now, it’s more important for my children to know that I’m their mother and that I love them. In fact, I I if I gave them the scientific information without the relational information, I’d be robbing them of the truth, utterly failing to meet their needs.” Now, John Lennox says something quite similar. He just mentions that the first obvious yet important thing to say about the Bible is that it’s literature. In fact, it’s a whole library of books. Some of them are history and some poetry, some in the form of letters, and so on. Very different content and style. So, he writes, “In approaching literature in general, the first question we should ask is, how does the author who wrote it wish to be understood? For instance, the author of a mathematics textbook does not intend it to be understood as poetry. Shakespeare doesn’t intend us to understand his plays as exact history and so on. So, both Rebecca McLaughlin, John Lennox, they’re pointing out Genesis it’s not an unscientific book, but its primary purpose is not to teach us scientific details. If you were late for a play and you couldn’t get there on time and you walked in after the first act and you sat down and you asked the person next to you how did it begin? You don’t expect them to start by telling you in what year the playwright was born or how the set was constructed or how the various actors were chosen for their parts. You just want to know about the story itself. And in turn, we shouldn’t try to force Genesis to answer a lot of technical scientific questions where the author is concerned really with telling the story. Only the first 11 chapters of Genesis deal with matters of creation and early history. Rest of the book deals with God’s search to bring man back to himself through the patriarchs, the lives of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. So, Moses isn’t writing Genesis as a scientific textbook. He’s writing to tell us about the great love God has for those he created, his plans and purposes to make us his own. So, because Genesis wasn’t written primarily as a scientific textbook, we find among faithful godly Christian men and women there are vibrant discussions and disagreements about things like the age of the earth and whether the days in creation are 24-hour days or extended periods of time and whether the various species appeared spontaneously or they were directed by God to arise in an evolutionary manner, whether animals died and decayed before sin entered the world and whether the flood was local or worldwide and whether life gives clear evidence of design with forms so complex that they could never have evolved just through natural selection. Those are all discussions that well-meaning godly Christians can have with one another. And we have uh two illustrious science professors in our congregation and they’ve given years of study to develop expertise in their fields that touch on these matters. You know Tom Chappell, university geology instructor. He’s one you might want to talk to about the dating of some of the rocks that he has spent many years studying. And John Wood, he’s taught biology at university level for decades. Another one to talk about life species and how they’re related to one another. And John’s been very involved for many years with the American Scientific Affiliation. That’s a network of Christians. They work in the sciences and they study the intersection of faith and scientific discoveries. Tom and John are scholars who love God. I’d encourage you to talk with them about any matters of creation, anything else that touches on their fields of academic study. They’ve studied the handiwork of God. They believe in the handiwork of God. They’re great resources for our church. If you’re looking for scientific sophistication, don’t come to me because my my instincts regarding creation and the first chapters of Genesis, they probably align best with the hillbillies and the homeschoolers. That’s that’s my tribe. When I read the first book of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, Magician’s Nephew, there’s this wonderfully imagined account of the creation of Narnia where Aslan the lion sings creation all things into existence. First there are no stars and doesn’t make any difference if your eyes are open or closed. And there’s something under your feet, but you can’t tell if it’s not wood, it’s not grass. It’s all cold and still. There’s no wind blowing. Then the voice of the creator starts singing joined immediately by other voices. And suddenly these children are watching this. Stars are blazing and a sun shows up that looks much younger than any sun they’ve ever seen before. And a valley and a river spontaneously form. And spreading out from the singing lion, the valley grows green with grass and vegetation runs up the slopes like waves. And little spiky things appear out of the earth and they become trees. and and the the whole grass looks like this bubbling pot of water as lumps and humps are showing up and swelling and then they burst an animal emerges from each of those lumps and humps and and the dogs come out barking as soon as they arrive and the antlers of the stag show up first before the rest of the animal appears and frogs keep plopping out of the ground near the river and start croaking and panthers and leopards shake off the grass and showers of birds are coming out of the trees and the biggest hump in the grass breaks open and out of out comes the sloping back and the majestic head and the four baggy trousered legs of an elephant and on and on it goes and someone like me who has no scientific sophistication that reads like a science textbook. >> [snorts] >> And I like think of creation uh as Genesis simply describes it. That God created Adam and Eve as mature, fully grown people, one made out of the ground, the other one made out of a rib. They weren’t zygotes or embryos or beings descended or selected from generations of hominids or Neanderthals. And if God can create a mature man and woman why not a mature world for them to inhabit? I could imagine a garden newly planted whose trees have growth rings and Adam and Eve can immediately eat the fruit off those trees and Adam and Eve can lie on a hill at night and look up at the stars millions of light years away, stars that God created only a few days earlier when the universe burst forth. But keep this to ourselves. Don’t let Tom and John know that I get my science from C.S. Lewis’s children’s books, okay? It’s our secret. One writer on the subject of origins that I I find interesting is Oxford mathematician, lay theologian John Lennox. He’s written many books on the intersection of science and faith. In his fairly short book called Seven Days that Divide the World he sees some middle ground in this uh realm of origins. He accepts evidence for an old earth, significant evolutionary adaptation, but he questions whether the mechanism of unguided evolution is sufficient to explain all the life forms we see. He’s a mathematician, so some of the strongest arguments he sees for evidence of creation is the way that the universe is so rationally and mathematically ordered and it’s understandable by people like us. So, he states that on the one hand the supernatural acts of Jesus, the incarnate word of God recorded in the New Testament, were mainly instantaneous. Waters turned into wine without the normal long process. Bread and fish are multiplied in an instant. Could not this be intended to show us how the creator creates? He also conceives that no major doctrine of scripture is affected by whether one believes that the days in Genesis chapter 1 are analogical days or that each day is a long period of time inaugurated by God speaking or whether one believes that each of the days is a normal day in which God spoke followed by a long period of putting into effect the information contained in what God said on that particular day. What is important, Lennox says, is that on each of the days God spoke, which is not a description of a natural unguided process. So, he acknowledges the limits of science. Science can never tell us that nothing is eternal. How could science ever prove that? He notes that perhaps the most significant overlap between the Bible and science is confirmation that our universe had a beginning. What is striking is that the Bible claimed that for thousands of years, whereas scientists really only in the last 100 years have achieved the consensus that our universe stems from a singular event, that it had a specific moment in time beginning. So, Lennox invites us to enjoy this description by journalist and author Bill Bryson. He’s speaking of the moment our universe began, and this is a description compatible with current scientific understanding. He says, “And so from nothing our universe begins in a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory, much too swift and expansive for any form of words. The singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second, a second a second that many cosmologists will devote lifetimes to shaving into ever finer wafers, are produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. A lot of heat now, 10 billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements, principally hydrogen and and helium with a [clears throat] dash about one atom in a hundred million of lithium. In three minutes, 98% of all the matter there is or ever will be has been produced. We have a universe. It’s a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and it’s beautiful, too. And was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.” So let let’s move on from thinking about the compatibility of Genesis and science to look at the text itself. The first words God has to say to us in our Bibles. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. First words of God’s revelation to us, the eternal God stepping into human time. Martin Luther was once asked asked what was God doing before he made the world? And Luther I think was annoyed by that question. And he said, “God was cutting switches with which to flog people who ask those questions.” John Lennox said those words were so potent for him when he was a a student at Cambridge University on Christmas Eve 1968 because he heard those words read to the watching world on live television by the crew of Apollo 8 as they orbited the moon. He says the context was a triumphant achievement of great science and technology and it caught the imagination of millions of people who watched it. To celebrate that success the astronauts chose to read a text that needed no added explanation or qualification even though it was written millennia ago. The biblical announcement of the fact of creation was as timelessly clear as it was magnificently appropriate. Now that word used in Genesis 1 for created is an interesting one. It’s the Hebrew word bara and this is a term only reserved for God in the Bible. As human beings we can we can make things, we can build things, we can form things but a different Hebrew word is used for human activity. Bara is something only God can do. It’s used in interesting passages like like Psalm 51 where David cries out to God create in me a clean heart. Or Isaiah 57 where God will create praise on the lips of people who are in mourning or when God creates the nation of Israel spoken in Isaiah 43. That kind of creating is only something God can do. It can involve the work of raising up a nation or just restoring a sinner’s heart to himself. Or it can involve spinning out galaxies in the book of Genesis but whether it’s creating universes or drawing people to himself, it’s the same kind of miraculous activity that only God can do. And he doesn’t need any pre-existing materials to do it. Anything we would call our work of creation, a work of art or a garden shed, of course we need materials to work with but God needs none of those. Hebrews 1:3 tells us by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. And again Psalm 148, “Praise him, sun and moon. Praise him, all you shining stars. Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the skies. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created. So, God God needed no materials to create. He simply spoke and it was. This is often referred as creation ex nihilo, meaning creation out of nothing. Now, we do read, before we get very far in Genesis, however, before God spoke in verse 3, something was there. It says, “The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Formless, empty, no discernible structure. I don’t know what that might have looked like. I imagine it as as a soccer game, really. A display that has no discernible order or structure or purpose. If you’ve been watching [clears throat] the World Cup, I found this useful guide to the various soccer sessions that helps me follow the game and and their diabolical offside rule and everything else that’s happening, but when we read, “In the beginning, the spirit of God was hovering over the waters,” there’s this drama of readiness there. It’s like, you know, you go to a symphony orchestra and you hear the musicians warming up and they’re tuning their instruments at random and squawks and squeaks and they’re running up scales and it’s formless. Then, in just suddenly, there’s a moment. The maestro comes, he taps his baton, and everything becomes silent. Everyone anticipates the down stroke, and that’s when that beautifully organized, harmonized performance begins. That’s kind of how I imagine Genesis at the beginning. We also need to know, as we enter the Genesis story, it’s the start of our story. It’s the start of human history, but the story itself is ancient. It doesn’t begin with us. It doesn’t begin with the moment of creation. In fact, there were already many actors on the stage. In the early chapters of Genesis, right through the book of Revelation, we’re given significant imagery insight into what theologians refer to as the council of the gods or the divine council. And the reason we’re going to talk about that for a couple moments is as we begin Genesis, we are going to encounter this theme of the council of the gods throughout the first 11 chapters. We’ll touch on it in chapter 1, it’ll show up in chapter 3, chapter 6, chapter 11. We find it influencing all the four major events we’re going to look at this summer. This is a pre-creation council and it prepares us for the appearance of that great villain in chapter 3, that puzzling, unexpected presence of evil in paradise, serpent in the garden. We learn that there was there was cosmic conflict happening long before humans fell into sin. And if they if the council of the gods is a bit of a new discovery in scripture, we’re not going to try to make sense of all of it this morning. We’ll return to it as we progress through the chapters. Um it’s not a particularly obscure theme in scripture. It’s kind of once once our eyes become accustomed to it, we find it’s it’s kind of all over the place and it just helps us understand a lot of what’s going on in the creation account and throughout the rest of the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments. God is not portrayed as ruling in isolation. He’s presiding over an assembly of created heavenly beings who worship him. They carry out his commands. They participate as subordinates in the administration of his creation. Those beings, they’re variously referred to as sons of God, as holy ones, as angels, as hosts of heaven, and even as Elohim, which is the plural word for God, meaning they’re sometimes described as small g gods. Elohim is a is a word similar to our English word sheep. It can designate one animal, can designate a whole group of animals. Elohim can refer to the one single eternal God or the ones he created to make up his council, these small g gods. Now, we we might react against that thought because in English to use the term gods, that smacks of polytheism, a belief that there are many gods in existence, but the Bible’s completely consistent in declaring there’s one God almighty. He has no rivals to his throne. With these descriptions of small g gods, we’re not to understand them as independent deities competing against the God of creation. They’re created spiritual beings whose authority exists only because God grants it. Scripture presents an unrivaled creator surrounded by a heavenly court of created beings that are referred to as sons of God, which is a very warm familial term to address them. We’re we’re called sons of God, and so are these heavenly beings of this divine council. So, with new eyes, perhaps, let’s look at a couple of verses in the Psalms. Psalm 89 verses 5 through 7. Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord. Your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones. For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord, a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones? Awesome above all those who are around him. Or Psalm 82:1, which uses both uses of Elohim, singular and plural. God has God Elohim has taken his place in the divine council in the midst of the gods Elohim, he holds judgment. Beginning of the book of Joel, if you can remember back, we read that the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came with them. Those same sons of God with Satan show up again in Job in chapter 2. But touching on creation near the end of the book of Job in chapter 38 the Lord is asking Job a series of questions with a point of demonstrating that Job really he has an inadequate perspective in understanding what’s happened to him and all the misfortune that he’s had to endure. And God said these words to Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know. Who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” When the great creator began speaking our universe into existence that heavenly hierarchy of holy ones or sons of God or Elohim, they couldn’t help but shout for joy. So creation should first be thought of as a kingdom not as a machine that’s just a driven by chemistry and by physics. And at some point, we don’t know when it happened, something went very wrong among that kingdom, that council of the gods. Some of them turned against their creator and they broke bad. And at that time that hierarchy of of created heavenly beings, they didn’t just cease to exist. They continued and they continue today to oppose God, to oppose God’s people. We see it in Ephesians chapter 6 when the Apostle Paul says, “Our struggle’s not against people. It’s not against flesh and blood. We’re battling rulers, authorities, powers of this dark world, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Again, beings once created by God to be part of his council, part of his his realm, who have fallen and now wage war against him. In that unseen realm, some may be of the same ones who shouted for joy at the creation of the universe. They’re waging war. They’re seeking to spread havoc throughout creation. We’re victims. We’re refugees of that war. We’ve been broken by temptation. We’ve been shattered by our own sinfulness. Thankfully though, at the dawn of creation stood our redeemer Jesus. He’s the one who will one day bring an end to all opposition against God and his creation. All of the Trinity, all of our all of our triune God was involved in creation. Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit’s hovering over the waters. God is creating. All the Elohim, the the the lesser sons of God are shouting for joy. And Jesus is right at the center of it. John chapter 1 speaks of Jesus when it says, “In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing that was made has been made.” And look at Jesus involved in the creation of the same hierarchy of those heavenly powers. He says, “He’s the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. By him, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible, invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. All things were created by him and for him. He’s before all things. In him, all things hold together.” And it was always God’s plan, no matter what went wrong, to bring us to himself, to have us as his own through the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. We read that clearly in Ephesians chapter 1. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God’s grace. We read that and we know that we’re not afterthoughts to God. Even before the creation of the world, we were chosen to be made blameless by the redeeming power of Jesus’ blood. I mean, influenced by that evil, whatever the wherever the evil came from, we fell into sin, left us more wicked in God’s sight than we can ever imagine, but at the same time we’re so loved by God. He was glad to give himself to us through the blood of Christ, suffered and died on the cross so that our sins could be fully expunged and taken away. Fully forgiven. It’s all planned and purposed by God before the even the first words of creation were spoken. So all of us were part of that great dance of God’s creation, his redemption. This summer is just going to be an opportunity for us to open our eyes. We’re going to revel in it once again. We’re going to close with a few words from the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning who writes about how our world is so influenced, so infused by that unseen realm of a God who loves us. She writes, “Earth is crammed with heaven. Every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries and daub their natural faces unaware. Let’s Let’s spend a bit of time in personal prayer and here are some things that I thought we might want to to pray together in the next few moments. You might want to just consider God’s universe and extol the power of the universe that he has created for us. Praise God that he has no rivals that any of those rulers, authorities, powers of this dark world, the spiritual forces of evil, they’re all bound for defeat. And just thank thank Jesus that he loved and cared for you even before the creation of the world. This is just your personal time with God, just to thank him, to praise him, to worship him and I’ll close this off in a moment.