January 14, 2024 Sermon
Sermon title: “In the Beginning”
Scripture: Genesis 1:1-5
(Other lectionary suggestions include Psalm 29, Acts 10:1-7, and Mark 1:4-11.)
Genesis 1:1-5
Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath
1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
The sermon title is “In the Beginning,” and those who like to make jokes say that BASEBALL is mentioned in the Bible, and it's right here: the Bible says, In the Big Inning! (Another joke is that TENNIS is also mentioned in the Bible. In another place in Genesis, it says, When Joseph served in Pharaoh's court!)
That's it for the jokes....unless I think of one! But seriously, our Scripture for today assumes the sovereignty of God. What is the 4th word in Genesis? GOD. “In the beginning GOD...” did such and such. Says the commentator John C. L. Gibson, “Genesis Chapter 1 ....is one of the immortal documents of the religious spirit. It has that strange mixture of simplicity and profundity which is the mark of all great literature.” Back to the sovereignty of God.......When I was in seminary, the Old Testament professor said on more than one occasion that that's the first and most important point: GOD is sovereign, not you, not Israel. but GOD. I guess another way to put that is that it's not MY will that's important, but YOUR will that is important, O God. Says John Gibson, “Because he created the world it belongs to him and he decides everything that happens in it.”
Gibson points to certain Psalms that talk about God the Creator. First of all is Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein....” Psalm 89 says, “The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine; the world and all that is in it, thou hast founded them.” And there are more Psalms that celebrate God as the Creator. Says Professor Gibson, Israel would say these Psalms of praise to God in the Temple, emphasizing “God's sovereign will and power shown in Creation. He who made all things is Lord over all things and therefore Lord and Saviour of his people NOW.”
Dennis Prager, the broadcaster and conservative commentator, says in his commentary on Genesis that there is something inherently good and happy about the assumption that GOD IS. Prager says that the assumption of a God from the start means that life matters. Right and wrong matter. What you do matters. The idea that there might not be a God never entered the minds of ancient biblical writers. The Bible starts out with that assumption: God IS. Right now, going through my mind is a line from John Keats, I believe, from his “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” The line is, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty. That's all you know and all you need to know.” The bible starts out with GOD IS, and I'm guessing that was the ancient writers' way of saying. “That's all you know, and all you need to know.”
The Interpreter's Bible (a copy of which we have in this church) says that the writers of Genesis had to have been familiar with the Babylonian Creation Story called Enuma Elish. In that story a good god slays a bad god, and the earth is formed from the dead body of that bad god. The Genesis Creation Story is quite different: God creates “ex nihilo” in Latin, or from nothing. In the Genesis story God is ABOVE nature, not a part of nature. And another thing: in Genesis God creates LIGHT before he sets the sun and the moon in the sky! Interesting, isn't it? You and I know that we get our light from the sun - and yet in Genesis, God creates light first before he creates the sun. In my younger days when I thought I knew all the answers, I thought, “How primitive to think God created light before he created the sun!” But perhaps the biblical writer was getting at something deeper: God is ABOVE nature and not a part of it. The Egyptians worshipped their sun god Ra. But the Israelites were smarter than that! Israel's God wasn't the sun or a part of the sun. He was ABOVE the sun because he created everything. The Israelites didn't worship ANY kind of idol, even the sun. They worshipped the Ruler of all Nature, as one of our hymns says. So, what is the writer of these words in Genesis trying to suggest? God is a great God, greater than all the others. In fact, he is so great that even his WORD creates light, sun or no sun. Powerful stuff, don't you think? Those who would look at Genesis as a science book are misguided. It's a book of poetry about the One True God, the God who IS.
Says commentator John C. L. Gibson, there had to be at the outset “a declaration of faith in God as Creator. Israel had constantly to be reminded that the God who had, she thought, cast her adrift powerless in the midst of great and cruel nations was in charge of the world. Here in the chapter that opens her Scriptures she is given one of the most impressive of such reminders. As one by one his mighty acts in creating the world are rehearsed, she is being prepared for the later rehearsal of his mighty acts in her own election and redemption. And her eyes are being lifted to a more distant future still, to a day when men and women everywhere would recognize her God as Lord and King.” Remember, God would tell Abraham later on in Genesis 12 that through him “all the families of the earth will be blessed,” God's intention was that all the nations of the world would know him and worship him. “That was why he had chosen Israel. That indeed was why he had created the world. Having started the task with so overwhelming a display of his power, he could not, being God, do other than see it through to its conclusion.”
Gibson says that even for those who wrote Genesis, and for those for whom it was first written, it could not have been easy to take in all that was packed into those first verses. And it is not easy for us, either. But, he says, it wouldn't hurt if we approached Genesis with a childlike faith, summed up in this hymn that you know, “He's got the whole world in his hands.” And the last verse says, “He's got you and me in his hands.” Says Gibson, “A clever man wrote this chapter, and clever men have pondered it and argued about it ever since. But in the end of the day Creation yields its secret only to those who have the childlike faith to say, “God who made the earth, The air, the sky, the sea, Who gave the light its birth, Careth for me.” Isn't that beautiful? Amen.
Pastor Skip