Sermon Notes + Quotes:
Transcript:
We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel, and with our new year, here comes a new Bible book. I’m so excited to get started in the Book of Genesis together. As we begin, I would love to just pray for us. Will you bow your heads? Lord, as we begin this new year, I pray that You’d grant to us an awareness that what we continue to need is not just the changing of a page on our calendars, just so we can escape the difficulties of the last year; but Lord, the changing of our hearts to draw us back to You. Set our sights beyond survival and all the way on to revival. As we begin our study of Genesis, Lord, as we go back to the beginning, I pray that You’ll give us a new beginning in our vision of who You are and who You desire for us to become as Your people – living for Your glory, serving Your purposes as Your church in Your world right now, in this particular moment in history with all of its challenges and its opportunities.
Make us ever aware and humble about our need of You, Lord. And keep us ever aware and rejoicing and how rich, how deep, how abundant and how amazing is Your love for us, Lord. Teach us to walk in the light of Your amazing grace. Lord, give us a clearer vision of Your truth, a greater faith in Your power and a more confident assurance of Your love toward us. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen and amen.
Well, folks, our English Bibles have been divided into about 1,189 chapters that happened somewhere back in the… I think it was the 13th century, actually. And then somewhere along the 16th century the verse divisions came along, and there’s about just a little over 31,000 verses in your English Bible, depending on which version of the English Bible you have, but I love studying all of them together. We’ve finished Revelation, and now I love it that we’ve gone all the way to the other end of the Bible to Genesis.
I firmly believe if you pull a thread in Revelation, the Bible crinkles all the way through, all your pages crinkled all the way through to Genesis and vice versa. There is a thread that runs all the way through the whole thing, and it’s God’s story of redemption. It’s a sweet song of salvation and we’re so glad to be able to study it together. Well, as it relates to Genesis, and as we start any new Bible book’s study, we always ask what genre of literature is it? Who is the author? Where do we get it? Those sorts of questions.
And of course, the older a book is the harder it is sometimes to be able to answer those questions. Genre is a little easier because it’s manifest, it’s evident, in the literature itself. And the cool thing about Genesis is it’s got a variety of genres of literature in it. There’s everything, of course, from the begats to narrative that sounds very much just like historical narrative. There’s some poetry. And of course, our Bible is all 66 books, it’s like a complete library of literature with poetry, with historical narrative, with letters that are written to individuals, letters written to a single church or a group of churches, and apocalyptic literature, like we just studied with a Book of Revelation that talks about the end of times and all of the eternity and the great hope we have in the person and work of Christ.
So, Genesis is going to be really wonderful and rich from a literary standpoint. We’re really going to enjoy it. As to authorship, most conservative Bible scholars, attribute the first five books of the Old Testament to Moses. That may or may not mean that they think he wrote all of each of those books, but we’ll explore that little bit with Professor John Lennox when I chat with him on Friday, January 15th, here at TVC Online. I hope you’ll join us 6:30 PM Central Time.
He’s a guy that can talk about that. I don’t have a lot to contribute to those arguments. There are some books that I’ll recommend for you, probably next week I’ll show you some of those. But man, he has got a great book called Seven Days that Divide the World, and John Lennox will be fascinating to talk to about all of that. So, for now though, turn in your Bibles with me to Genesis 1, and that’s where we’re going to start. And Genesis means origins or beginnings, and that’s just another little bit of background, I want to give you before we read. But it’s so awesome and an amazing book. Why? Because it does help us begin to deal with some of the really big questions of life that people have been asking for a long, long time – centuries.
Since there have been people on the planet, we’ve been asking some of these kinds of questions. I’ll throw them up on the screen for you. Why is there something rather than nothing? And this goes back at least in the 17th and 18th century to the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It’s a bit of a brain twister, I realize that, especially if you haven’t had any coffee this morning yet. So, I’m going to invite you to get a cup of coffee as you’re listening or watching and make sure that you’re dialed in. Others have gone on beyond that question to ask why is there this particular something instead of nothing? And that’s a great question too. Why is our universe so complicated, so beautiful, so well-ordered? How is that possible? Is it all reducible to a gigantic random co-location of atoms and chemicals caused by some motion that began somewhere, at some time, that we don’t really understand?
But if you’re truly interested in the origin of all things, of course, you’ve got to go back further than that and ask the question, if this all happened randomly, where did those elements come from, those atoms and chemicals? Where did they come from in the first place? And where did the space-time continuum into which they exploded out originate? Where did that come from itself? So, there’s so many questions that you have to just keep pushing back on those questions. Other questions are: Where did everything come from? Does God exist? What does it mean to be a human being? What’s gone wrong with the world? Well, it’s so easy to tell there’s some things wrong in the world. What’s gone wrong in the world? Why can’t we find the difference between right and wrong? Why isn’t there some kind of consensus on those kinds of things? That’s a great question. And how do we find out the difference between right and wrong?
Is there any hope of redemption for humanity? What a great question. And of course, that’s one of the reasons we study through books of the Bible, because questions like this, we begin to find answers in a book like Genesis. And on the redemption question, that’s the part where pull that thread and it crinkles all the way through all the pages. Every single book of the Bible, all 66 of them, find their fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ, God’s redeemer, whom He sent into this world to save and rescue a people that God could call His own. So, these are really good questions.
And if you’ve come to the conclusion, if you come to this conversation or this study with a more naturalistic, atheistic worldview, and you think that everything that exists is just in the physical realm, we’re going to challenge that view a little bit. I know it doesn’t get challenged much in the world in which we live, but I think it’s important. I think the same kind of scrutiny that the biblical worldview is under… It’s a fair thing to take an atheistic, naturalistic worldview and put that same scrutiny to it as well.
The French mathematician and philosopher Bernard De Fontenelle asked this question,
“Behold a universal immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Our world is terrifying in its insignificance.”
–Bernard de Fontenelle
And you can just feel the pain in his heart and the anxiety, the angst if you will, at his own smallness and the vastness of the creation around him, whether you’re talking about just the vastness of the city I live in or the vastness of the state, or the nation, or the continent, or the earth. And we’ll do a little comparison chart and some photographic projected images on some of the sizes of some of the planets next week. That’s going to be amazing to watch.
But you can kind of feel a little bit of what Bernard De Fontenelle was wrestling with, can’t you? Even yourself – I can understand it. Now sometimes that really works for us. I have said before, and I still believe, it’s really good to be reminded of our smallness, isn’t it now? Because the more puffed up I get, the more I think this is all about me, the more pride has set in, and I will argue here at The Village Chapel all day long that pride is at the root of all of our sin. It’s sort of that foundation stone to all sin. It’s our pride, our wanting to be autonomous, our wanting to be apart from God, to be our own God, to have the highest place of authority. In reality that’s the problem. We’ll see that in the Book of Genesis as well.
In the Book of Genesis, we’ll read about the beginning of space-time continuum, the creation of light, the source of everything in the physical universe, including all that it contains, which is fascinating. We’ll read about the origin of the galaxies, the solar systems, continents and oceans, and the origin of the animal kingdom. Everything that crawls, walks, swims or flies. It will also confront, I think, which kind of explanation for all of those things and the existence of all those things and the coexistence of all those things makes sense. Which explanation do you think makes the most sense out of reality that you observe?
We’ll ask some questions like: Did it all just happen that one day – this one very special planet emerged out of nothingness, and that it just so happened to be 93 million miles from its sun, the precise distance to allow for carbon-based lifeforms to emerge with just the right combination of nitrogen and oxygen imbalance? At 79% to 20% with a leftover remaining 1% for variant gases? Did that just happen? Did we just happen to have a ring of ozone around us? Did we just happen to have two thirds to one third water-to-land mass ratio on our planet so that biological cells could just randomly form and magically contain the intelligent design information that we’ve come to call DNA? Wow.
Which, by the way, if you unwound one strand of DNA from your body or from my body, just from one cell, and we got… I think there’s somewhere upwards of a hundred trillion cells in your body and in mine, roughly that’s the average, okay? But if you unwound one strand of DNA, it would be about six feet long. You can check online, and with a hundred trillion cells, what that gives us, if you were to put them end to end, my DNA would stretch for 110 billion miles. That’s hundreds of trips to the sun and back. That’s amazing. One human person.
Could intelligent life like you, like me, as partially intelligent as we are, could life like us have begun as a single cell in the primordial ooze? And could it have been somehow or another all of a sudden found another one that spontaneously emerged, and all of a sudden could they start joining together? And somehow or another, over some long period of time, you get a tadpole that somehow over a long period of time you get two tadpoles that mate and that now you start to propagate an entire group of them, and then all of a sudden they start mutating, and all of a sudden you get a two-legged creature, and all of a sudden you get a second two-legged creature at the same time before this one dies so that they could both one male, one female actually get together and procreate. Is that possible? Does that sound a little fantastic to you? Did we evolve from the goo, go through the zoo and end up with me and you? Is that what happened?
I think it’s an honest question. I think it’s worth asking. Or is there evidence for intelligent design everywhere throughout the physical universe? As far away as the Virgo cluster of stars and as close as your nose with its millions of olfactory nerve endings that work together to tell you those are hot, fresh chocolate chip cookies. I can smell them now.
Arno Penzias, American Physicist Radio Astronomer and 1978 Nobel Laureate in physics, he says,
“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.”
–Arno A. Penzias
Penzias also is credited, along with a colleague of his, with discovering cosmic microwave background radiation. And that’s what led to the idea of the Big Bang Theory, and the theories that the various models of that have come around.
So, this guy really knows what he’s talking about and it’s fascinating. He comes to the conclusion that it seems to be a plan as opposed to a random accident. Well, my guess is that some of you are starting to think about switching to a different channel right now, perhaps having a brain cramp of some sort, and perhaps a little bit of levity might be helpful at this particular time. And so, I will turn away from the philosophers and scientists for just a moment and head, which I need to do also often, run to somebody from more the film and art world.
And it was Maria Von Trapp who said,
“Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.”
–Maria von Trapp, The Sound of Music
In addition to making some kind of comment about the origin of all things, she also goes on to suggest her belief in some kind of moral law when she goes “somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.” That’s right, okay. If you were over 40, you could finish that song and if you were not, look it up. It’s called The Sound of Music. It’s a great song.
These subjects are indeed important subjects to explore because they will impact our everyday lives. Whether or not you know it, it happens, even the mood that you’re in sometimes is impacted by your view of whether or not your life has meaning and purpose and value. And so, these questions that we ask about the origin of all things, about the existence of God, about whether human life has any meaning, or purpose, or value, I love the way the Bible begins to help us wrestle with those kinds of questions. Bertrand Russell probably one of the most well-known atheists, a political activist, a Nobel Laureate himself, said this in a moment of brutal honesty,
“Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.”
–Bertrand Russell
Okay, now, brutal honesty there.
In other words, the idea that human life actually has purpose is meaningless. Why? Well, if you’re a natural atheistic philosopher and the physical universe is all that exists, you have a real hard time explaining a lot of things that are immaterial in the world that we can’t find under a microscope and we can’t see in a telescope. And so that’s why I love having a book like Genesis to study, a book like our Bible that where God has revealed some things to us that we can’t discover on our own, but that requires, of course, that I acknowledge that I need outside help to understand or learn things. And my pride often gets in the way in that consideration.
So, this becomes real important though. Now, think about it. If you were growing up and you’re going for two decades to school in a school which was teaching you over and over and over and over again that the physical universe is all there is, and that you would therefore come to the conclusion that your life has no meaning, no purpose, and no value into a culture that for decades has taught its young, that there’s no such thing as truth, true truth, they’d suggest to you that truth is what you want it to be. You create your own truth just as they’ll say. You create your own reality; you create your own identity. And I would suggest to us if you would be open to thinking about this, that’s a burden too great to bear for any one of us, myself included. I don’t have the strength, the knowledge, I don’t have the wisdom. I don’t have the soul tenacity to be able to carry that burden of deciding what it means to be a human person or of deciding what’s true or false, what’s right or what’s wrong – any more than I do to have to make a decision to be the final word on what’s beautiful or what’s good.
And so, when we longed for the true and the good and the beautiful in this world, we have to at least be honest, at least as honest as Bertrand Russell was, and say that for there to be some sense of purpose and meaning in life, that means there has to be something beyond who we are and beyond this physical universe. And the sum total of what we believe about these kinds of things is typically called our worldview. And at the center of it, what holds it all together, is our noetic structure.
And so, every little bit of something that you believe makes up your worldview. That’s the way you view the world, that’s the easiest way to describe what a worldview is. But like an uncertain teenager, I think a lot of people go through life with an adolescent worldview, not stopping down to actually think about these things. They prefer to just not think. “No, no, I don’t have anything to believe, that’s just too big. I can’t really deal with that. I don’t have the education. I don’t want to handle that right now. My life’s too complicated, whatever.” And we don’t want to think about that stuff. But I’m suggesting to you today that one of the reasons the Bible begins with all of that is because it is foundational, it’s at the center of the web of noetic structure, if you will.
And it is really good news because the burden, what this book says is the burden, isn’t on you. The burden isn’t on me. The Bible specifically, the Book of Genesis, speaks to us with clarity and offers certainty about where we came from, why we’re here, the meaning of life and what we can ultimately hope for. Genesis takes us back to the beginning and to the Beginner, to the designer and the creator of everything that exists. Genesis reveals God’s plans and purposes for the world in which we live and even for human life itself. Genesis offers us a pathway to a new beginning by looking back to the beginning, it opens up the way forward, helping us to know who we are, why we’re here and how we got here by learning what we were created for in the first place.
Let’s take a look then after all of that. Let’s take a look at Genesis 1,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Genesis 1:1
All right. That’s where I’m going to stop today. I don’t think I have… I mean, I’m telling you, we could go for two weeks just on that verse alone. And so, I’m very excited about it and we’ll get to verses two and following next week. But again, Genesis is not about a comprehensive scientific explanation for the origin of all things, not about offering us a precision model for the creation event, complete with formulas on how you can form your own star cluster, your solar system. You can form a moon, or a mountain range, or a unicorn, or a draft, no, none of that… We don’t get those plans laid out for us. There’s no sequential timetable that satisfies all curiosity about method, sequence, and process. And it certainly doesn’t provide us with a crystal-clear solution for all possible gap theories and all the questions that we might have about the process, like I said.
Now, as a matter of fact, what this Genesis creation account is all about is, it’s not an explanation of how God created everything. It’s a declaration that God created everything. And that’s what we have in Genesis 1:1. If you believe there was a beginning of created order, then you’ve got to push back until you come to something or someone that began that created order. Something or someone who’s always been there and who became the uncaused causal agent of everything that exists in the space-time, physical universe. I would suggest to you that someone or something is what we call God.
And that’s why I look at Genesis 1:1 and I go, “All right. There it is.” And it’s interesting to me that the Bible never seeks to prove the existence of God. It assumes the existence of God from the first verse and on forward. And I would suggest that the other thing that Genesis 1 is going to reveal to you, now this is just such a beautiful thing: The deepest longing of your heart and my heart is to be in a loving relationship. And that’s really part of the imprint that’s been left on us as Genesis 1:1 will teach us.
We were created “imago dei,” in the image of God. Part of what that means is that we live to be in loving relationship. And that’s so important for you, that’s so important for me. Even the hardest of hearts, yours or mine, when we have grown old, cold and crusty in our hearts, we are really desiring to know and to be known to love and to be loved. And the highest form of that I would suggest to you is that God knows you fully. There’s nothing you can hide from Him. He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows me better than I know myself.
And the beautiful thing is that, while God knows you fully, He also loves you completely. That’s the great news we get from the very beginning all the way through to the last chapter of the Book of Revelation, all through our Bibles. That’s that little thread, that great story of redemption that runs all the way through it. Well, Jonathan Edwards is an 18th century American philosophical theologian and brilliant mind, and in the end for which God made the world, Jonathan Edward says this,
“If we are attempting to determine the goal of the universe we behold around us, we should consult the architect who built it. It should be our priority to listen to him and rely on what he has told us about the design and astonishing fabric of his creation.”
–Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Made the World
Yeah, I think that’s really great. That is awesome.
And then quoting from John Lennox, Professor Lennox’s book, Seven Days that Divide the World, he said,
“The Book of Genesis is foundational for the rest of the Bible. Its opening chapter does something of incalculable importance: it lays down the basis of a biblical worldview. It gives to us humans a meta-narrative, a big story into which our lives can be fitted and from which they can derive meaning, purpose, and value.”
–John Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World
Ah, that’s such great news, isn’t it?
Well, we all have our presuppositions when we come to a book like this, and even as we approach life in general, we all have presuppositions in our worldview. We’ve embraced accepted things sometimes passively that have been handed down to us or pushed upon us. We’ve been influenced and informed by all of the voices that speak into our lives, whether those are entertainment voices or educational voices, or whether they’re news sources, whatever it might be; those are the voices that are informing us and influencing our worldview and shaping and forming our presupposition set.
I’ll be honest with you and tell you that I have presuppositions, I have selected and chosen many of them… and my presuppositions as much as I possibly can come from the biblical narrative, the biblical record. Why? Because it’s God’s word to us. It’s what God has revealed to us, so much of which we would never be able to discover on our own. And so, I trust Him, that’s one of the reasons we study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel and have a high view of Scripture. We know our need. What are your presuppositions as you come to the Book of Genesis? And I hope you’ll read along with us and study along with us, and perhaps even share this with some of your friends and invite them to come and join us on the journey through the Book of Genesis.
I’ll close with this quote from G.K. Chesterton,
“Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough.”
–G.K. Chesterton
And ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing bigger than the story of the beginning, the story that we’re reading here in the Book of Genesis. Let me assure you, the rest of what takes place in the Bible is quite reasonable. If you find here in Genesis 1:1 something that you can believe – that there was a beginning and a beginner, and that the beginner was God, a being that we should call God. If you believe that, then there’s so much about your Bible that I want to encourage you to read in light of Genesis 1:1. It’s a great beginning verse as I said.
I hope Genesis will arouse your curiosity to revisit those same big questions that we had up on the screen earlier. And to revisit those with the idea in mind that God is speaking to us – that we’re not left alone in a cold and an empty, just-merely-physical universe, but that God is speaking and continues to speak to us through His word, and that the fact that you and I ask questions is actually His gift to us. Especially, I think, that when He gives us these questions, the question what, when, where, why, I think those questions are all given to us as a gift to lead us to ask the question: Who? And the answer of course is God. He leads us right back to Himself. Yeah, that’s really, really powerful. Well, read ahead and I think you’re just going to enjoy, as I say, this journey through Genesis together. May the Lord be with us as we study His word together.
(Edited for Reading)
