Genesis 1 Sermon Notes

Genesis 1:1-31

Sermon Notes

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In the Beginning, God

March 4, 2018

Lynchburg Virginia

EXHORDIUM

God created Adam and Eve and put them in the garden.  They were to take dominion of the garden and cultivate it in God’s presence.  But they fell into sin and were driven from the garden.  A curse passed on to them with death, sorrow, murder, pain, struggle and the garden of God was abandoned.  The tree of life was forbidden.  But God did not abandon them.  He proved faithful to His promises from the very beginning.  He makes a promise to Eve and to her seed.  We see this promise and God’s faithfulness to it reiterated many times in this first book of beginnings.

         The book of Genesis is foundational to understanding the rest of the Bible. In fact, it presents to us the main themes of the Bible in stark relief over and over so that we can get what the rest of the Bible is about

         In the opening chapters of the Bible, we have creation, fall, redemption. As the chapters build, we have the theme of covenant develop clearly.

         In this book, God is the initiator and man is to follow His lead. We also have clear indication of man’s inability to do so. God gives man everything he needs for life and health and success and man repeatedly fails. Then God does not leave man in his failure. God provides a way for him by raising up a man to deliver man.

         We see this in Noah, Abraham, Moses, all through the Judges and finally David. And there a many other similar stories that reveal the salvation of men by man. But they all fail. This failure is the key to point is to Christ. To Christ is what it all means.

         And we even see Him here at the beginning as made is made in the image of God, as Eve has a promise of victory over the serpent and as the promise of the tree of life is in the one from whom flow the fountains of living water.

FOUR MAJOR THEMES OF GENESIS and THE BIBLE

        

1.   Creation- Gen. 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ² And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

2.   Fall- Gen. 3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

3.   Redemption- Proto-evangel Gen. 3:14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: ¹⁵ And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

4.   Covenant- Gen. 17:4  As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations. ⁵ Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee. ⁶ And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. 7   And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

EXEGESIS

Gen. 1:1   In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ² And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The opening of Genesis is the key verse, In the Beginning God. We often wonder what was here in the beginning. How can you have nothing? What was here before there was stuff? Since God has put eternity in our hearts, the thought of eternity past comes to mind. If God was here in the beginning, what was here before God? And that is where the curious mind must stop.

It is clear that there must have been a first something at sometime, in the very beginning. And Genesis gives us that answer. In the Beginning, God.

God is the first something and He is not a ball of gas waiting to explode. He is not an impersonal pile of goo hoping to make to manhood. No, God is the eternally existant One, who in the beginning made all things of nothing, merely by speaking them into existence. He has always existed. So, children and adults, when your mind wanders back to contemplate the beginning, let it always stop at In the Beginning, God.

Bishop Usher’s Date- 4004BC

         Ussher's proposed date of 4004 BC differed little from other Biblically-based estimates, such as those of Jose ben Halafta (3761 BC), Bede (3952 BC), Ussher's near-contemporary Scaliger (3949 BC), Johannes Kepler (3992 BC) or Sir Isaac Newton (c. 4000 BC)^. Wikepedia.

         These dates were widely held by the Church until the rise of geological dating in the early to mid 19^th Century. The church struggled with new proposed dates of the world. This set science against religious dogmatism and paved the way for Darwin’s Origen of the Species to be a popular manifesto of evolution requiring millions or billions of years.

         However, in the 175 years since that time, there is no real consensus on the dating. Floods particularly are a problem for the dating of rocks, as such, petrified and stratified or layered can be formed in the matter of minutes and hardened in a matter of months.

 CREC Memorial on Creation

The doctrine of creation lies at the heart of Christian living, deeply embedded within our assumptions about worship, knowledge, faith, celebration, beauty, and redemption. In recent decades, many conservative evangelicals have been moved by the science of the day to oppose the historic view of creation in six sequential days of common length, several millennia in the past. Instead, they hold that the bare ideas of creation presented in Genesis have little to do with the actualities of creation. Falsely pitting poetry and symbolism against history, they distort the text of Scripture and divorce ideas from the created order in ancient Gnostic fashion.

Science is a legitimate and noble pursuit, as is an aspect of the creation mandate (Gen. 1:26–28), and Christians should not be fearful or ungrateful for advances in scientific knowledge and technology Indeed, the best scientific developments have been the fruit of an essentially Christian worldview Advances in medicine, transportation, communication, computers, etc are God’s good gifts. We therefore encourage the cultivation of the scientific enterprise on the basis of fully biblical principles. Science and the gospel are not inherently antagonistic.

Bible People

         One of my common sayings is that we are Bible people. The modern world, particularly the academic world would hold this sort of statement in disdain as those committing to ignorance. But that is not true and never has been true.

Westminster Shorter Catechism

Q. 9.

         What is the work of Creation?

         The work of creation is, God’s making all things of nothing, by the Word of His power, in the space of six days, and all very good.

In the space of six days? What sorts of days? Days that last millions or billions of years? That has been presented. Meredith Kline says that Genesis 1 is a framework of highly stylized allegorical language and ought not be taken literally. Okay, prove that from the Bible!

The analogy of Scripture- Scripture explains Scripture. Everywhere in the Bible that we read of the days of creation, there is only a sense of regular 24-hour days. The Bible writers understand Genesis to be literal. By the way, the Bible writers and characters, including Jesus, also talk about Job and Jonah in literal terms.

So, is Genesis highly stylized? Yes, of course, just like most of the rest of the Bible. There are many literary genres revealed in the Bible: history, poetry, apocalyptic, prophetic. We should acknowledge this and read them as they are presented. But we should also let the Bible interpret the meaning for us. When it comes to Genesis 1, the rest of the Bible teaches us that it is a six-day, 24 hour creation. In order to be consistent with the Bible, itself, this interpretation is necessary.

This is important because the rest of the Bible hangs in the balance. If we jettison the historicity of Genesis, even if the rest of the Bible teaches it to be history, what keeps us from explaining away other sections of the Bible we do not think line up with history or science, or parts of the Bible that we simply find inconvenient?

We are in the midst of that battle now on several fronts. The issues of sexual identity strike right at the heart of God’s creation. It is no surprise that in those churches that have grown soft on creation, they grow soft on the rest of the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to hold fast the truth of the Beginning.

Gen. 1:3   And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. ⁴ And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. ⁵ And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Day 1- Light

         The first thing God created in a darkened world is light. He created light before He created the Sun and Moon and Stars.

God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. The light is good. But in this world of light, there is darkness and it takes God to overcome the darkness with light.

Gen. 1:6   And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. ⁷ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. ⁸ And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Day 2- God divided the Heavens from the Earth.

Gen. 1:9   And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. ¹⁰ And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. ¹¹ And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. ¹² And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. ¹³ And the evening and the morning were the third day.

Day 3- God formed the dry land and the seas.

         Grass, herbs, fruit trees.

Gen. 1:14   And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: ¹⁵ And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. ¹⁶ And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. ¹⁷ And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, ¹⁸ And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. ¹⁹ And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Day 4- The Sun, moon and stars.

         For signs, seasons, days and years.

         Sun rules day. Moon rules night. Give light on the earth.

                  Even in darkness, the sun gives its light to the Earth.

        

        

Gen. 1:20   And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. ²¹ And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. ²² And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. ²³ And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

Day 5- Sea creatures, flying birds, whales and flying fowl.

Gen. 1:24   And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. ²⁵ And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Day 6- Cattle, creeping things, beasts of all sorts.

Gen. 1:26   And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. ²⁷ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. ²⁸ And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Gen. 1:29   And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. ³⁰ And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

Day 6- Man, in the image of God, male and female, with dominion over the creatures.

Dominion mandate- Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, have dominion over every living thing.

This mandate flies in the face of modern environmentalism. Man can be the problem, true, but Biblically speaking, man is the answer. The world is not better when man leaves nature by itself. God told man to tend his garden.

EXHORTATION

In the Beginning, God and behold, it was very good.

Gen. 1:31   And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Our good God created everything and behold it is all very good. We must acknowledge Him and fully submit to Him. He will not disappoint us.